A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril an Alternate History
Page 2
Dahlgren, Ulric. Colonel, U.S. Volunteers; hero of Gettysburg and son of Admiral Dahlgren.
Dana, Charles. Publisher and U.S. assistant secretary of war.
Davies, Henry E., Jr. Brigadier general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, 1st Brigade, Cavalry Division, Army of the Hudson.
Davis, Jefferson. President of the Confederate States of America.
Delacroix, Jean-Yves. Lieutenant, 9th Battalion, Les Voltigeurs de Quebec.
Denison, George. Lieutenant colonel, Canadian Militia; commander of the Royal Guides.
Disraeli, Benjamin. Leader of the Tory, or Conservative, Party in Great Britain.
Dow, Neal. Brigadier general, U.S. Volunteers; the colonel of the 13th Maine Regiment of the Army of the Potomac.
Doyle, Sir Charles Hastings. Major general, British Army; commander of Imperial Forces in the Maritime Provinces of British North America.
Dunlop, Hugh. Commodore, Royal Navy; commander of the coup de main against Washington.
Edward, Prince of Wales. First son of Victoria and Albert, and heir to the British throne.
Ewell, Richard. Lieutenant general, C.S. Army; commander, 2nd Corps, Army of Northern Virginia.
*Foley, Richard. Irish seaman, Royal Navy, and deserter.
Forrest, Nathan Bedford. Major general, C.S. Army; commander, Cavalry Division, Army of Tennessee.
Fox, Gustavus "Gus." U.S. assistant secretary of the Navy -essentially in modern terms, chief of naval operations.
Franklin, William B. Major general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, XIX Corps, Army of the Gulf.
Gates, Theodore B. Colonel, U.S. Volunteers; commander of the 20th New York State Militia Regiment.
Gatling, Richard. American businessman and brilliant amateur inventor of farm machinery and the automatic weapon known as the Gatling Gun.
Geary, John W. Brigadier general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, 2nd Division, XII Corps, Army of the Hudson.
Gorchakov, Aleksandr Mikhalovich. Russian foreign minister.
Gordon, John B. Brigadier general, C.S. Army; commander, Georgia Brigade, Early's division, Ewell's corps, Army of Northern Virginia.
Grant, James Hope. Lieutenant general, British Army; commander of Her Majesty's military forces in British North America; considered the best general in the Empire.
Grant, Ulysses S. Major general, U.S. Army, victor of Vicksburg, and commander of the District of the Mississippi.
Green, Thomas. Major general, C.S. Army; commander, Cavalry Division, Western Louisiana District.
Hardenburgh, Jacob. Lieutenant colonel of the 20th New York State Militia Regiment.
Herans, Otto. Lieutenant colonel, U.S. Army; commander, 2nd New York Cavalry, 1st Brigade, Cavalry Division, Army of the Hudson, at the Battle of Stottville.
*Hathaway, Michael. First lieutenant, U.S. Volunteers; commander of the guard at Mount Vernon.
Hill, Ambrose Powell. Lieutenant general, C.S. Army; commander, 3rd Corps, Army of Northern Virginia.
Hogan, Martin. Private, U.S. Volunteers; young Irish immigrant and scout for the Bureau of Military Information (BMI), Army of the Hudson.
Hooker, Joseph. Major general, U.S. Army; commander, Army of the Hudson.
Howe, Albion P. Brigadier general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, 2nd Division, VI Corps, at the battle of Kennehunk.
Ireland, David. Colonel, U.S. Volunteers; commander, 3rd Brigade, 2nd Division, XII Corps, Army of the Hudson.
Keckley, Elizabeth. Free woman of color, seamstress, and confidante of Mrs. Lincoln.
Kilpatrick, Judson. Brigadier general, U.S. Volunteers; commander of the Cavalry Division, Army of the Hudson.
Knight, Judson. Sergeant, U.S. Army; chief of scouts, Army of the Hudson.
Layard, Austin David. Member of Parliament, undersecretary to Lord Russell at the Foreign Office, and envoy to Richmond.
Lee, Robert E. General, C.S. Army; commander, Army of Northern Virginia.
Lincoln, Abraham. Sixteenth president of the United States.
Lincoln, Mary Todd. Wife of Abraham Lincoln and First Lady of the United States.
Lindsay, Sir James. Major general, British Army; commander, Brigade of Guards at the Battle of Claverack.
Lisovsky, Stefan S. Rear admiral, Russian Imperial Navy; commander of the Baltic Squadron sent to New York City.
Longstreet, James. Lieutenant general, C.S. Army; commander, 1st Corps, Army of Northern Virginia.
Lowe, Thaddeus. Scientist; colonel, U.S. Volunteers; founder and commander of the Balloon Corps.
Lydecker, Garrett L. Captain, Corps of Cadets, U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Lyons, Lord. British ambassador to the United States.
Marx, Karl. German expatriate revolutionary and journalist living in London; foreign correspondent for the pro-Lincoln New York Tribune.
McCarter, Michael William. Former sergeant of the Irish Brigade, discharged for wounds after Chancellorsville.
McEntee, John. Captain, U.S. Volunteers; chief, Bureau of Military Information (BMI), Army of the Hudson.
McPhail, James L. Civilian provost marshal of Maryland and later deputy chief, Central Information Bureau (CIB).
Meade, George Gordon. Major general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, Army of the Potomac.
Meagher, Thomas Francis. Major general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, XI Corps, Army of the Hudson.
Mercier, Edouard-Henri. French Imperial ambassador to the United States.
Milne, Sir Alexander. Vice admiral, Royal Navy; commander of the North American and West Indies Station.
Moreau, Michel Andre. Colonel, French Imperial Army; commander, Zouave Regiment of the Guard.
Morgan, John Hunt. Colonel, C.S. Army; commander, Morgan's Cavalry Brigade, Army of Tennessee.
Morton, Oliver. Republican governor of Indiana.
Muravyov, Mikhail Nikolayevich. General, Russian Imperial Army; known as the Hangman for his brutality in suppressing the Polish Revolt.
Murphy, Frank. Second lieutenant, U.S. Volunteers; acting commander, 13th Regiment New Jersey Volunteers.
Nicolay, John. One of President Lincoln's two private secretaries.
Paulet, Frederick Lord. Major general, British Army; commander of the Albany Field Force in the invasion of New York.
Polignac, Camille Armand Jules Marie, Prince de. French prince of the House of Orleans; brigadier general, C.S. Army.
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Andreyevich. Ensign, Russian Imperial Navy, aboard Aleksandr Nevsky, flagship of the Russian Squadron visiting New York.
Ripley, James W. Brigadier general, U.S. Army; former director, former chief, Ordnance Bureau.
Root, Elisha K. Director, Colt Arms Factory.
Rosecrans, William "Old Rosey." Major general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, Army of the Cumberland.
Rowan, Stephen Clegg. Captain, U.S. Navy; commander, USS New Ironsides, and acting commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron.
Russell, Lord John. British foreign minister in the Liberal Palmerston government.
Scarlet, William Lord Abinger. Lieutenant colonel; commander the Scots Guards Fusiliers.
Schurz, Carl. Major general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, Third Division, XI Corps, Army of the Hudson.
Sedgwick, John. Major general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, VI Corps, Army of the Potomac, and in independent command of the relief of Portland.
Semmes, Raphael. Captain, C.S. Navy; commander of CSS Alabama, the greatest of the Confederate commerce raiders.
Seward, William H. U.S. secretary of state.
Seymour, Sir Michael. Rear admiral, Royal Navy; commander of the squadron sent to destroy the U.S. Navy's South Atlantic Blockading Squadron at Charleston.
Sharpe, George H. Brigadier general, U.S. Volunteers; director of the Central Information Bureau (CIB) and commander of the 120th Regiment, New York Volunteers.
Sherman, William Tecumseh. Major general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, XVII Corps.
Slocum, Henry W. Major
general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, XII Corps, Army of the Potomac and Army of the Hudson.
*Smoke, James R. "Big Jim." Chief agent for the Copperhead movement in Indiana and subsequent agent of Lafayette Baker's Secret Service.
Spencer, Christopher. Inventor of the Spencer repeating rifle.
Stanton, Edwin McMasters. U.S. secretary of war.
Steinwehr, Adolph von. Brigadier general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, 2nd Division, XI Corps, Army of the Hudson.
Stimers, Alban Crocker. Inspector general of ironclads, U.S. Navy.
Stoeckl, Baron Edouard de. Russian ambassador to the United States.
Tappen, John R. Major, U.S. Volunteers; acting commander, 120th Regiment, New York Volunteers.
Taylor, Richard. Lieutenant general, C.S. Army; son of President Zachary Taylor; commander, Western Louisiana District.
Thomas, George. Major general, U.S. Volunteers; "the Rock of Chickamauga," who succeeded Rosecrans as commander, Army of the Cumberland.
Victoria, Alexandrina. Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; ascended her throne on June 20, 1837.
Washburn, Cadwallader C. Major general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, XIII Corps, Army of the Gulf.
Welles, Gideon. U.S. secretary of the Navy.
Wetherall, E.R. Colonel, British Army; chief of staff to Lt. Gen. William Fenwick Williams, commander, Imperial forces in British North America.
Williams, Alpheus S. Brigadier general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, 1st Division, XII Corps, Army of the Hudson.
*Wilmoth, Michael D. Sergeant, U.S. Volunteers; senior order-of-battle analyst, Central Information Bureau (CIB), and protege of George H. Sharpe.
Windham, Sir Charles Ashe. Major general, British Army; commander of the Portland Field Force.
Wolseley, Garnet J. Lieutenant colonel, British Army; assistant quartermaster, Imperial forces in British North America.
Wright, Horatio G. Brigadier general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, 1st Division, VI Corps.
Zeppelin, Count Ferdinand von. Captain, Prussian Army; official observer of the American Civil War.
MICHIGAN AVENUE, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, 1:35 PM, OCTOBER 15, 1863
The smoke hung over the water's edge, mixed with early snow flurries that blew in from the black clouds rolling down from the north across Lake Michigan. Maj. Gen. William "Cump" Tecumseh Sherman's horse picked its way over the burning debris and the bodies that littered Michigan Avenue. Some of the bodies wore red coats. Most were in some ragged combination of butternut and gray or in nondescript civilian clothing. A gaggle of prisoners was being pushed along by the bayonets of their guards.
Sherman pointed to the group. "Separate out the Rebs and the Brits. Hang the Copperheads." His troops had known him affectionately as Uncle Billy. Ever after he would be known as Hanging Billy. He was hanging every man bearing arms without a uniform.
Copperheads! They were the virulent Lincoln-haters, mostly antiwar Democrats, loathing emancipation and determined to stop the war, overthrow the federal government, and take the Midwest out of the Union and into the Confederacy. They had plotted and prepared for the great day when, organized and trained by Rebel officers, they would storm all the Confederate prisoner-of-war camps in the Midwest and arm the liberated prisoners in their thousands. Thus Camp Morton in Chicago with seven thousand trained prisoners had fallen.
The behavior of the liberated Rebels had been correct save for sating their hunger and replacing their rags in the rich shops of the city. The Copperheads were simply out of control. Gangs had gone through Chicago with lists of prominent Unionists to murder in their own homes or to round up and shoot in the stockyards. Bodies floated down the Chicago River into Lake Michigan for days. The Copperheads had thought things out well and seized all the armories and murdered the militia officers wherever they could. Then the British and their Canadian militia allies had come steaming over the lake to add red to the garrison.
But Sherman and his XVII Corps had fallen on the stricken city with a hardness of heart that a pharaoh would have envied. Sires of a conspiracy born and nurtured in the dark had not had the stomach for a tough fight in the light of day. Many threw their weapons away but were hunted down by the Chicagoans out for revenge and shouting "Copperhead quarter!" It was martial law at its hardest, and Sherman was determined that they would never rise again against the United States?
It was not only Sherman who saved the Midwest. The shrewd prescience of Lincoln's new chief of intelligence, Brig. Gen. George H. Sharpe, had been decisive in the month before the rising. He had sent his chief of scouts, Maj. Milton Cline, and two hundred specially trained cavalry to assist state authorities against the Copperhead plots.2 Fresh on the heels of scotching the attempt to liberate the POWs at Camp Morton outside Indianapolis, Major Cline had run wild over Indiana, striking at one Copperhead concentration after another, rallying the local Unionist militias and home guards. Slowly, town by town, village by village, the Loyalist men had prevailed. And as in Chicago, there was precious little mercy shown. The people of the Midwest would always associate the rising with the sight of men hanging from trees in town squares and along country roads.
The viciousness of this cycle of murder and revenge was replicated across the region in almost every city, town, and village. That had been the first setback in the Copperhead plan -the Union men fought back. The news of Sherman's ruthlessness in Chicago suddenly collapsed the uprising everywhere else. The loyal men and the state militias mopped up the last of it, and they made Hanging Billy look like the most tender of civil libertarians. The troop trains heading to Chattanooga passed hundreds more bodies hanging from trees. Sherman had to intervene repeatedly to stop the house-to-house revenge killings by proscription lists. Those lists were voluminous for men who had been too free with their opinions before the Stab in the Back, as it was now being called. Sherman's hellfire threats to the state authorities to rein in the excess was the only thing that put a stop to what would be known as the White Terror.'
CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, 5:00 AM, OCTOBER 16, 1863
The men of the Army of the Cumberland called their present position "Starvation Camp." They were shivering in the last cold, wet hours before dawn. Heavy autumn rains had turned their positions into seas of mud. The army had been reduced effectively to quarter rations, and hunger obsessed every man. Their animals were dying first, in large numbers. Many of the poor creatures, unable to be fed, had been sent out of the tightening siege by the one remaining supply route through mountain and mud that was so difficult to travel that countless died on the way. Supplies coming into the army were shrinking to a trickle.
At the moment when the Union needed every one of its veteran field armies to ward off foreign invasion and new rebellion, the Army of the Cumberland lay dying of complete loss of faith in its commander more than from outright starvation. Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans-"Old Rosey" -had been undone by his defeat at Chickamauga and seemed incapable of even occasional powerful bursts of energy. Simple problem solving now seemed to elude him. None of this was lost on his men.
A wise general knew that he had only one man to defeat-his opposite number. A general defeated in his own mind carries the doom of his entire army. Yet Gen. Braxton Bragg, commanding the Confederate Army of Tennessee, failed to vigorously take advantage of his opponent's moral surrender to deliver the coup de grace. His efforts to close off the final supply route into Chattanooga were never pressed with a killer instinct. He had even sent off his most aggressive commander and the author of his victory at Chickamauga, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, to lose himself in a mindless campaign against Knoxville in a region bare of subsistence. Bragg's remaining energy was expended on engineering the relief of his next most competent subordinate, Gen. D. H. Hill, for which he had asked Jefferson Davis himself to come to the siege lines to preside.
This and the news that Grant was coming to the rescue were unknown to the men in "Starvation Camp." It would take all Grant's skill to save them. After
all the subtractions from the powerful army Grant had assembled to take Vicksburg, he was bringing with him only XV Corps. Given Bragg's tight grip on the surrounding mountains, it would take a miracle for him to save the Army of the Cumberland. And Grant would not be on the scene with his troops in less than two weeks.
ABOARD THE RIVERBOAT OHIO STAR ON THE OHIO RIVER, 4:29 PM, OCTOBER 16, 1863
Grant couldn't remain still; the pain wracked his body. A vicious mount had fallen on him in New Orleans and injured him seriously a few weeks before. He hobbled up and down the riverboat's deck on crutches, anxious to get his hands on events, but he was confident in the actions he had already taken.
A wave of near panic had washed over the Army with the news of one disaster after another, but Grant was as imperturbable as a block of granite. A desperate Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton had sent him orders appointing him commander of the Military District of the Mississippi -essentially everything east of the Appalachian Mountains, south of Canada, and down to the Gulf. It was a command that would have swallowed half of Europe. At his direction, the armies began to move. He did not give a hint of distress or uncertainty, and waves of calm and assurance seemed to radiate from him. Up the Mississippi, hundreds of steamboats and barges moved his forces north. He had appointed Cump to pacify the Midwest while he concentrated on saving the besieged Army of the Cumberland. The Union dared not lose a field army at this moment of crisis. Veterans could not be spared, and the shout of triumph from her enemies to the south and north would have demoralized loyal men and women. There had been too many disasters already.
That was why he read the daily reports from Sharpe with such intense interests. Each one was a comprehensive analysis of current intelligence, far superior to anything he had received from the overwhelmed War Department in the past. For the first time, he was able to build a complete strategic picture of the situation besetting the Union. With that in mind, he could better plan his own operations. Not that the Daily Intelligence Summaries were bearers of good news. On the contrary, they were rigorously objective and spared no had news. That was fine with Grant. He needed facts, not sugarcoating. As his steamer puffed up river, he finally gave in to physical necessity and found a chair on the deck. He leaned his crutches on the railing, a cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth, and watched the muddy water part before the bow. In his hand was Sharpe's latest telegraphic report, fresh from the cipher clerk's rendering.