A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril an Alternate History

by Peter G. Tsouras

  The report put the feel of the overall situation at his fingertips. He summarized it in his own mind-Bragg had invested the Army of the Cumberland as tight as a tick; the men were starting to starve. The secretary of war's representative, Charles Dana, was in Chattanooga, reporting how Rosecrans had lost his nerve and the confidence of his men. Longstreet, his old friend from the prewar Army, commanding his own I Corps, Army of Northern Virginia, had been detached to strike at Knoxsville.

  Maj. Gen. George G. Meade was doing all he could to keep up with Robert E. Lee's vigorous maneuvers in northern Virginia. The Royal Navy had taken control of the southern reaches of the Chesapeake Bay, and an attack up the Potomac on Washington by its lighter ships was possible. There was evidence at this time of Rebel-British cooperation. To the north, Portland still stood siege, and the British had reinforced the investing force. Union Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick was taking his time to get his VI Corps up there.

  Hmm, that sounded just like Uncle John, Grant thought. Good in a fight but slow to get into it. Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, on the other hand, was moving rapidly up the Hudson on its eastern shore to a collision with the British at Albany. Now Hooker had the opposite problem-he would not waste time getting into a fight, but at Chancellorsville he had lost his nerve when Lee had had the temerity to upset Hooker's plan. As Grant saw it, the problem was whether some British general would have the same effect on Hooker.4

  Reports indicated that a large reinforcement from the British Isles was on its way to Canada. A French army had also marched up from Mexico. It was moving along the Gulf Coast and was reinforced by more troops that had landed at Galveston after a French fleet had destroyed the Navy's blockading squadron there. New Orleans was the likely target of the combined French forces. There was no word of any British or French action against the East Gulf Blockading Squadron, which had concentrated at the Pensacola Navy Yard. Rumors stated that Admiral Dahlgren's South Atlantic Blockading Squadron had been destroyed, but there were doubts as to their veracity.

  The Copperhead rising in the Midwest seemed to be subsiding, beaten on every hand by Loyalist men. Grant had independent confirmation of that. He had Sherman's telegraph in his hand as well. It smelled of the fire that had burned half of Chicago. If he knew Cump, his friend would make the Midwest howl. He decided to take the immediate action of relieving Rosecrans of command of the Army of the Cumberland and replacing him with Maj. Gen. George Thomas, the IV Corps commander who had held the rearguard at Chickamauga.

  Still, time was not on his side. He leaned back in his chair, rocking it back and forth as he smelled the snap in the air. Already the days were turning unseasonably cold.'

  THE CINCINNATI TYPE FOUNDRY, CINCINNATI, OHIO, 3:22 PM, OCTOBER 15, 1863

  Close to Rebel-infested Kentucky just across the Ohio River, Cincinnati had been struck hard by the Copperheads. Confederate sympathizers had burned the first factory where Richard Gatling had built his new gun in 1861; now they were determined to burn the foundry where he had just finished his first order of thirteen guns ordered by Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler and paid for out of his own pocket. It seemed that half the city was on fire, with Copperhead mobs burning and killing. For days now, the factory workers had feared to come to work. Only Gatling and his partner, Miles Greenwood, had made it to the building, a stout brick structure with a high wall and strong gate.

  It would not be strong enough. All the Confederate officers who had crossed the river to organize the mob had driven them to new frenzy. They were howling outside, and that noise rose to a roar just before the gate shuddered at a tremendous blow. Gatling and Greenwood looked at each other as they stood in front of one of the guns they had dragged into the yard. "It was a splendid-looking thing, a marvel, a curiosity, a dazzle of shining metal and sleek design, even in its fledgling state. Six steel barrels were arranged in a tight, intimidating circle and affixed on a narrow platform suspended between two large wagon wheels. Jutting from one side of the device was a hand crank."6 This gun had been only finished two days before and not been tested.

  Richard Gatling was a tenacious man as well as one of the great inventors of an age of invention. Even before the war, he had grown rich from his developments in farming machinery that had drawn amazed attention at the Crystal Palace Exposition in London. As civil war loomed, though, his thoughts turned to arms. He reasoned that he could thin the battlefield and spare lives for the Union if one man firing a quick-repeating gun could take the place of a hundred. While his logic of war was naive, his ingenuity was as practical as they came. Thus in less than a year was born the weapon he was now quickly loading with steel cartridges as the gate groaned under the assault of the mob's battering ram. Governor Oliver Morton of Indiana had seen a display in Indianapolis the year before and become an enthusiastic booster. That had won Gatling the opportunity to have the Army test his gun in May and July. The examining officers were unusually impressed and urged its purchase in large numbers. Their report had been dead-filed by the rigid and obdurate chief of the Ordnance Bureau, Brig. Gen. James Ripley, who loathed any new idea that came across his desk. Only Butler had shown interest, but there was a limit to any general's personal pocket.

  The gate failed with a crack as its crossbar snapped at the last blow. Its halves swung back to strike the brick walls with a loud crash. The mob waited only long enough to drop the ram before screeching in victory and rushing into the factory yard. Gatling's right arm spun the crank on the gun around and around as his left swiveled the barrels right to left. The gun groaned as it spat out its bullets, higher and higher the pitch the faster he turned the crank.

  The mob went down in a spray of blood as if death's scythe had swung clean through them. Gatling kept on firing into the packed mass as a spray of bright shell casings spewed onto the brick pavement. The mob's bloodlust howl now turned to shrieks of terror and pain. Those in the middle turned to claw their way to safety but were held by those pressing from behind until they, too, fell to the harvest of the machine. He stopped firing, and the barrels spun slowly to a wispy smoking stop. Gatling and Greenwood were gape-mouthed by the reality of their weapon. Bodies, dead and writhing, two and even three deep, carpeted the threshold of the gate and back out into the street. There were so many that a man could walk across it without touching the ground!

  OFF CAPE FEAR, NORTH CAROLINA, 5:04 PM, OCTOBER 15, 1863

  John Dahlgren woke from his coma to look up into his son's face, now ringed with a new light beard of angel gold. "Papa, Papa, thank God," Col. Ulric Dahlgren whispered, as the surgeon looked down at the admiral, taking his pulse and beaming. The worst was past. The wound had not festered. Luckily, no bone or nerves had been damaged, as deep as it was.

  He tried to speak, but his throat choked on its own dryness. A water glass was pressed to his lips, and he drained it to lie back and let his wits come back to him. He did not recognize the cabin and could feel the ship underway. "The battle," he whispered. "The battle?" His mouth went dry again.

  "A victory, Papa!"

  It took a moment for it to sink in. "Tell me."

  "We crushed them, Papa. We crushed them. Only a handful of their ships got away. Black Prince sank alongside New Ironsides a half hour after she struck. We beat two ships of the line into kindling, turned them into torches. A third struck and is in tow. Three frigates, two corvettes, and two sloops rounded out the Royal Navy's humbling. My God, Papa! You've commanded the greatest naval victory in our history!"8

  "Our losses?"

  "Sloop Pawnee, monitor Nahant, I'm afraid. Donegal put too many shots through Nahant's deck, smashing her engines, and letting in the ocean that took her down with all her crew." He paused, "And, yes, ironclad Atlanta. She rammed Shannon with her spar torpedo and sent her to the bottom, but she died in the process. Cromwell went down with her. And we lost three gunboats-Marblehead, Ottawa, and Wissahickon.'

  Dahlgren looked anxious. "And the submersibles?"

  "Papa, the tender picked them up, but Resista
nce shot her to pieces just after the recovery, and she burned. Both boats were lost, but we saved the crews."10

  Capt. Stephen Clegg Rowan, commanding USS New Ironsides and acting commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, had been immediately informed that the admiral was awake and came down to pay his respects. Dahlgren pressed him immediately to explain the battle. Rowan pulled up a chair. "Well, Admiral, your plan just played itself out. Your tactics and your guns won the day. After you were wounded, the battle broke into two parts. The ships to our front, the two monitors, and Wabash and Pawnee, kept moving in line ahead and engaging the enemy line led by St. George and then Donegal. We pounded both ships into splinters; it was amazing how fast the shells from your guns will set a wooden ship on fire. A burning ship of the line is a magnificent and sad sight, I swear. The British frigates followed them into the same meat grinder.

  "We were having a tougher time with Black Prince and Sans Pareil; they had come up on either side of us after our screw was damaged. The monitors following us pounded Sans Pareil until she struck. The British were still game. What brave men. Their frigates and corvettes crowded in, and I think would have boarded the monitors had not our gunboats come up from Morris Island to rake them. I think the last straw was the arrival of our three monitors and more gunboats from Port Royal followed by most of the ships at the base. I think seven of the enemy got away. Their other ironclad, Resistance, escaped into Charleston Harbor. The navy has never won such a victory, Admiral."11

  "Where are we now, Rowan?"

  "That's the had news, sir-off Cape Fear. The entire squadron is sailing to Norfolk. We were lucky to win at Charleston, but we could not risk a second fight against a larger force. Our supplies are low, and we can barely get everyone away. We evacuated Port Royal just in time. The last late ship out reported a large British force approaching from the southeast. They'll find nothing but the ashes of our base. I'm proud to say we got off all the troops both at Port Royal and around Charleston. They're a bit crowded and on short rations, as were we, but we were able to find room for all twelve thousand men. I'm sure they feel the accommodations are better than British hospitality."

  Dahlgren said, "Yes, that's twelve thousand men to fight another day-and a fleet in being."

  "We put a lot of them on them on the captured British ships. It was crowded with their surrendered crews and all the men we fished out of the water-we paroled and turned over to the Rebs 1,400 wounded prisoners. We could not care for so many. But we have over 2,500 unwounded prisoners, Admiral -2,500 prisoners, by God!12

  "And one very special prisoner. It seems that we picked up Prince Alfred, Victoria's second son, wounded on Racoon and saved by the ship's ratings. Shows you how a good officer can win the love of his men. Why, I put him in the cabin next to yours."

  At that moment, they heard the clatter of a tray of food hurled into the passageway from the next cabin. A dripping plate rolled past the open hatch to the admiral's cabin. A very English voice screamed, "Swill! Damn your eyes! Don't come back until you have a proper meal!"

  A smile twitched at the corners of Dahlgren's mouth. "You were saying, Rowan?" Then, suddenly exhausted, he sank back on his pillow, but his eyes gleamed 13

  THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, LONDON, 11:30 PM, OCTOBER 15, 1863

  The House sat in dead silence. The Speaker in his red robes and Restoration wig nodded to the shrunken little man sitting in for Prime Minister Palmerston, who had been felled by the shock of the disaster at Charleston.

  Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell knew in his heart the role his own inattention and missed opportunities had played in bringing this unimaginable humiliation to Crown and country. He had failed to alert the American minister, Charles Francis Adams, that the government had determined to seize the two ironclad rams being fitted out in Liverpool?4 He had been in no hurry, unaware that things automatically had begun to happen. The Americans had sent USS Gettysburg to intercept the rams should they escape, as had the infamous commerce raider CSS Alabama the year before. He also suspected that the ship was forewarned of the order of seizure by a Confederate sympathizer in his own office. Events had spiraled out of control. His orders to seize the rams arrived too late; one of them had escaped, and Gettysburg as well as USS Kearsarge had sunk two British warships in British waters when they tried to stop the capture of the ram. The government had declared war in the upswell of public outrage and dispatched reinforcements from the Channel Squadron to Adm. Alexander Milne with orders to immediately break the blockade of Charleston. Russell had escaped censure in the debate for war by simply lying with a facility he did not know he had.

  His hands were not clean, and he knew it. There was British blood on them, and he could not help obsessing about Lady Macbeth's wail that not all the perfumes of Arabia would wipe away the stain. He took refuge in confining himself to reading Milne's report, but even that was a crucifixion. The sweat beaded on his forehead though the chamber had caught the early autumn chill. He read on of the crushing defeat that was unparalleled in British history: the great ironclad, HMS Black Prince, sunk, and Resistance barely able to escape into the safety of Charleston Harbor. He read the list of the famous old names of ships of the line that had burned or struck. When he read the name St. George, a groan escaped the grim men on their green leather benches. The list went on and on as he read the names of frigates, corvettes, and gunboats lost.

  He finished and sat down to thundering silence. The British people and their leaders had sustained a shock to the very basis of their selfesteem, their birthright to victory and success. Such a loss to their ancient enemies, the French, might have been taken better. After all, the French were due a victory simply by the law of averages. But to suffer such a humiliation from the Americans, for whom the British establishment felt such contempt, left them humiliated and perplexed beyond all measure. They had taken little notice of the flood of Britons and Irish to the American republic. They might have taken solace from the argument that they had been beaten by themselves, men of fundamentally the same blood, language, religion, and history, but after the American Revolution, they were loath to acknowledge any common root stock.

  It was then that John Bright rose and faced the Speaker. The tension exploded. In moments the members were on their feet in a roar, waving arms, shouting, throwing papers. Their pent-up rage suddenly had found its outlet in this most famous friend of America in Parliament. Bright was the foremost reformer of the age and as obdurate foe of slavery as he was the champion of the rights of the common man to the franchise in the United Kingdom. From the reform of the Corn Laws to the relief of Ireland in the grip of famine, he had become a moral power in the tradition of William Wilberforce, the immortal enemy of slavery. And for all that he was a Quaker, he was the most deadly debater in the House, ready to eviscerate anyone careless enough to challenge him.

  Already he was known derisively as "the member for the United States." And it was his friendship with the beleaguered Union that enraged the House. There was deeper fuel for the members' anger, though. The very men who had looked with such sympathy on the South had been long frightened of Bright, the reformer. He had made it quite clear that the success of the Union would be the proof that democracy worked. That success would provide the irresistible moral impetus for the extension of voting rights to the British common man. It was no accident that the very men in the British establishment who so ostentatiously favored the South were equally opposed to Bright's reforms and its threat to their monopoly of power.

  The Speaker struck his mace of office against the floor to bring order, and only slowly did the members resume their seats with an illgraced and sullen snarl. The Speaker nodded to Bright. "The chair recognizes the member for Durham." Russell's slight form seemed to shrink even more on the ministers' bench.

  Bright began. "The gentlemen are rightly shocked by the news of Charleston. It is a sad day for British arms, and many homes will mourn throughout the realm. But the gentlemen have no right to be shoc
ked that we are at war. For two years the government and privilege in this country have goaded and insulted the American republic in its trial of freedom against the slave power. Even more, this government and privilege have done incalculable injury to that republic, though hiding behind a tissue of neutrality."

  "Shame, shame!" an angry voice cried out from the upper benches.

  "Shame, indeed, sir!" Bright shot back. "Shame that it has been British-built warships that have savaged and ruined the merchant shipping of the republic, which has done us no injury. Shame that it is British foundry, arsenal, and factory that have equipped the armies of the slave power and kept them in the field far beyond the poor ability of its own industry. Shame that it is British bacon and biscuit that feeds the armies of the slave power while it was fifty thousand barrels of American flour, generously donated, that has fed thousands of British mill workers and their families destituted by that same slave power's calculation to withhold cotton to force this country to become its ally."

  "And shame that when the great republic has remonstrated again and again about the commerce raiders built at Birkenhead, this government has turned a blind eye. Lord Russell has told the House that the Americans offered insufficient proofs that the purpose of the ships being built was warlike. I have seen copies of these proofs, and there is nothing insufficient about them. Had they been written with the finger of God Almighty Himself, I doubt not Lord Russell would still proclaim them insufficient. He would refer them to the opinion of Lucifer. Is there any doubt where his sympathies lie? Has anyone forgotten his efforts to force a settlement on the Americans that would have served to achieve that independence, which the slave power has not been able to win on the field of battle. I have it on good authority that the notorious Alabama escaped on the warning of a friend of the slave power in the Foreign Office before the government was moved to detain the ship. Strangely, North Carolina seems to have bolted Liverpool in the same way." 15