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

by Peter G. Tsouras

  The cavalry troops never did consolidate into battalions; with their vast forests, Canada and the northernmost states of the Union were not the best cavalry country. The Canadian cavalry tended to be modeled more on the American experience of dragoons - ride to the fight but fight dismounted. They were usually uniformed in blue with yellow facings, wearing a brown fur busby with a white plume, and armed with saber and carbine, the latter greatly inferior to the American single-shot Sharps breechloader.

  A unique troop was the Royal Guides of the Governor General's Bodyguard for Lower Canada, or Royal Guides for short. Based in Montreal, they were actually the "family" troop of Lt. Col. George Denison, whose grandfather had founded the unit in 1812. His father had commanded it as well. The fifty-five-man unit was unique in both dress and function. The family's long association with the unit had given Denison enough familiarity to encourage him to study carefully the history of cavalry as well as draw on the experiences of the war to the south. Ardently pro-Confederate, he paid special attention to Southern achievements. In Denison s creative hands, the Royal Guides became an excellent intelligence-gathering and scouting unit. They wore blue with white facings and a nickel-plated dragoon helmet with a red feather. In this case, the soldier as peacock took precedence over a scout's need for anonymity. It had not taken Wolseley long to appreciate the usefulness of the Royal Guides and the value of its commander. He and Denison became good friends, and he introduced the Canadian into his small circle of British Army intimates, men chosen for their abilities. He was one of the few men Wolseley allowed to call him "Joe."

  Denison was part of a relatively small group of openly pro-Confederate Canadians. He was a through and through Imperialist and a very pugnacious man. Even after Vicksburg and Gettysburg, when such sympathies did not appear to serve Canadian interests well, he and a small group of fire-eaters continued to champion the Southern cause. Both living in Montreal, Wolseley and Denison were inevitably drawn to each other by similar opinions. "I tell you, Joe," Denison would say, "that if three and a half million Southerners can come close to beating the entire North, then what cannot three and a half million British North Americans backed by Britain achieve?"19 It was a calculation much on Wolseley's mind.

  Three Canadian militia infantry battalions were brigaded with one British battalion for wartime operations. The British were consciously following the Roman historical model in which non-Roman auxiliary cohorts served with the Roman legions. This system was followed in India, especially after the trauma of the Great Mutiny. In Canada seven such brigades were created initially. It is no wonder that when overseas, British units were referred to as "Imperial battalions." The Canadian battalions also trained with these same British battalions and quickly picked up some of the smartness, field craft, and cunning of the regulars. The Americans had failed to parcel out their regular units in a similar fashion at the beginning of the Civil War to leaven the huge masses of volunteers that had rushed to the colors; their road to professionalism had been much longer and more painful than their Canadian counterparts.

  While the Canadian infantry benefited by training with the Imperial battalions, they received additional assistance from another 104 British NCOs specifically sent out as infantry training teams. The small number of Canadian cavalry was on its own in the absence of British cavalry until the arrival of a training team of fifty-eight British cavalry officers and NCOs. As sound as these measures were, they were only a beginning. Of the twenty-three Canadian battalions established by September, one had been raised in 1859, one in 1860, twelve in 1862, and the rest only that same year of 1863. Although most battalions had been created by incorporating existing militia companies, it took time to meld a battalion-level organization together, requiring skills -especially in leadership, training, logistics, and maneuver-at a more complex level than existed in the forty- to fifty-man community-based companies. With only training together as a battalion the eight days per year allowed by provincial law, there was a definite limit to how much experience even a close association with an Imperial battalion could impart.20

  VERMILLIONVILLE, LOUISIANA, 2:25 PM, OCTOBER 21, 1863

  To say that Banks was unsettled by the quickly advancing wave of French red and blue was an understatement. He had assumed that the enemy would await his own advance, a conceit common among amateurs. Now that Bazaine had plucked the initiative from his hands, he just did not know what to do. Unfortunately, his XIII Corps commander, Maj. Gen. Cadwallader C. Washburn, was as new to that level of command as a soldier could get. He had only assumed that position because Maj. Gen. E.O.C. Ward, one of Grant's better senior commanders, had just fallen sick and had to surrender command of the corps that very day. Grant had referred to Cadwallader as "one of the best administrative officers we have." However, it would not he administration that would beat the French.21

  That left Maj. Gen. William B. Franklin, commander of the smaller XIX Corps, as the only professional and experienced senior officer on the field. Franklin, top of his class at West Point in the same years as his friend Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, was a tough Regular Army fighter and had seen almost all the major action in the East. One admirer wrote: "He struck me as an officer of power-large with square face and head, deep-sunk, determined blue eyes, close-cropped reddish-brown hair and beard .1122 It was he "who had shared the brunt at Bull Run, who fought the rear-guard battles from the Chickahominy to the James, and held the pass of White Oak Swamp against half of Lee's army on the critical day at Glendale, who won at Crampton's Gap 'the completest victory gained to that time by any part of the Army of the Potomac .... "'23 His conduct had earned him command of a third of the Army of the Potomac in the assault at Fredericksburg on Stonewall Jackson's wing of Lee's army. Franklin fought hard and skillfully, but because Burnside had frittered away the time necessary to strike hard and fast, the assault never had a chance. It was no disgrace to be bested by Jackson, and Franklin had given Old Blue Light some anxious moments that day, a feat few could boast of.

  To that time, Franklin had been as loyal a subordinate as a commander could hope for, but Burnside's gross incompetence was too much. He plotted to remove Burnside. Instead, he was scapegoated for the disaster by the witch-hunting Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War. It did not help that he had been a protege of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, an object of special venom to the committee, which believed his dedication to victory left something to be desired. Ironically, another plotter, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, succeeded to army command. Franklin languished in New York without an assignment for six months until Grant could find a command for him in Banks's military district.

  Until he had been given XIX Corps in Banks's Louisiana command, he had worried that he might be ordered to lead black troops, the ten regiments of locally recruited blacks known as the Corps d'Afrique. Many of them were from old Louisiana state militia regiments of free blacks that had been mobilized by the Confederacy. Once New Orleans had fallen, they had been largely transferred to federal service, shorn of their officers. They had seen a deal of active service, and their assault on the defenses of Port Hudson, though repulsed, had been nothing less than heroic. Despite his distaste for black troops, Franklin had been appalled by the nefarious means of recruitment he had found upon his arrival. Black men had been arrested on the flimsiest charges and given a choice between enlistment or prison. Franklin's outrage at this practice had put a stop to it.

  Now outside Vermillionville, Franklin immediately saw the danger they were in. The army's sixty-five-mile-long line of communications back to Brashear City was wide open. He had argued with Banks against this expedition, but "Bobbin Boy" had had his eye on the political payoff of a victory and how well that would sit in Washington. With the British rampaging in New York and Maine, the administration desperately needed a success. For Franklin, the professional officer who had slugged it out with Stonewall Jackson, every atom of his experience had rejected this move. Banks should have keyed on the defense of New Orlea
ns by making sure the enemy could not pass through Brashear City again to threaten the city from the south. It was clear that once that barrier was passed, New Orleans would he next to impossible to defend. Holding Brashear City with its long difficult approach was the only way to defend the city.

  Once again he remonstrated with Banks. "I tell you, again, General, we are in a trap. All the enemy has to do is fix our front and sweep south and cut us off from our line of communications."

  Banks was one of those men who only got stubborn when confronted by his own mistakes. "We shall meet them on this field, General. Now, sir, rejoin your command."

  Franklin was not through. "By God, sir, you will hear me out!" He was a forceful man, and Banks almost seemed to cringe from the power of his personality. "Not only are we about to be cut off from our communications, but you have placed us with our backs to this lake and the bayous beyond. Why, all the enemy has to do is push us back and we tumble down the bluff and right into Bayou Capucin. We must quit this field and march south immediately, sir!"

  Confronted with a barrage of the obvious, Banks simply retreated into stubbornness. "Rejoin your command, sir!"

  In disgust, Franklin spurred his horse away from the command group to take his place with his small corps of barely six thousand men on the right of the line just as his skirmishers were rushing back through the line of battle. In his obtuseness, Banks reminded Franklin of Burnside, the bungler of Fredericksburg. It was a telling comparison for Franklin and Burnside had been mortal enemies. He muttered to himself that since he couldn't outright shoot that damned fool Banks, he was going to work out his anger on the approaching French instead.

  Bazaine had declined to oblige him. Instead of the French line, it was Walker's Texans who surged toward XIX Corps. The Frenchman had reserved the full weight of his own regiments for Washburn's large sixteen-thousand-man XIII Corps on the left. By Taylor's account, it was a veteran formation that had seen much action in the Vicksburg Campaigns. Bazaine had also given much thought to Taylor's analysis of Washburn and Franklin, and it was clear to him that he would rather attack the large veteran corps commanded by a political general than a small corps led by a pugnacious veteran. He would leave that tough nut to Walker's Greyhounds and the glory to the French.

  Bazaine had Taylor's shrewd biographical intelligence analysis of Banks and his corps commanders to thank for this unfolding opportunity. He had been suspicious when Taylor's scouts reported that Banks's line of communications had been left wide open. Surely it was a trap. It was a rare European general who would have blundered so. He sent the scouts out to confirm. Once Bazaine had realized what an imbecile opposed him, he sent his large Confederate cavalry division ten miles south to cut the Union line of communications and himself marched straight for Vermillionville. He almost licked his lips.

  Bazaine's first move was to send the bulk of his remaining cavalry with two battalions of Chasseurs a Pied south within sight of the enemy to cut the road to Brashear City. "Oui, messieurs," he mused to his staff, "Let General Banks observe. It is always wise to give the enemy something to be nervous about." He also thought to himself that the nervousness would be shared by the rank and file as the word flitted through the ranks that they were cut off to the south. Amazingly, Banks had not put his cavalry division on this open flank but held it in reserve.

  The men of the Union XIII Corps had a lot to think about. As word of the French cavalry's appearance on their flank spread, they could see the French line moving to engage. Their colorful ranks ate up the intervening ground as their drums beat to quicken the advance. French brigades seldom made a uniform appearance. Regiments of the line were brigaded with Zouaves or other individual units as the Foreign Legion or Tirailleurs Algeriens. But it was more than martial splendor that closed on the American lines. It was the reputation of the French. American military models had been uniformly French-from the kepi to tactics to the popular bronze smoothbore cannon personally developed by Napoleon III himself. Any military observer of the period would have identified the French as the foremost martial race in Europe. Prussia's glory still slept.

  And that reputation was swiftly closing the beaten ground between the two armies. The artillery of both sides, smoothbore and rifled, opened up, sending the first clouds of black smoke through the clear fall air and ugly death into the ranks of both armies. But the French kept coming.

  At four hundred yards, the American line erupted in a sheet of flame and black smoke. Frenchmen tumbled forward or pitched backwards. An eagle standard went down only to be snatched up again. But the French kept coming as the American fire became continuous. At three hundred yards, the French line stopped and delivered its first rifle fire. American bodies crumpled. Then the French drummers beat the pas de charge all along the line. The air throbbed until it built to crescendo, and on they came, the field echoing with " Vive I'Empereur!"

  HMS CAWNPORE, THREE DAYS OUT FROM ROYAL NAVY BASE HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, 4:30 PM, OCTOBER 21, 1863

  The Royal Navy troop transport lumbered through heavy seas, bearing the second great wave of reinforcements for the garrison of British North America since the Trent Affair of late 1861. Eight thousand had been sent then; twenty thousand-horse, foot, and artillery-were at sea or about to depart the British Isles, the greatest movement of the British Army since the Crimean War.

  Cawnpore carried the nine hundred men of the 41st Foot fresh from the garrison of Dublin. Their officers were particularly irked over the men's appearance and conduct, for it was their lot that the ship also carried the commander of British forces in North America, Lt. Gen. James Hope Grant. The men's resentment evaporated when they realized Hope Grant, as he was commonly called, was only interested in their welfare. A historian would later write of him, "Not many men have better understood war than this kindly, pious, daring lancer who could play as skillfully on the hearts of his men as on the strings of his beloved violon- cello."24 A contemporary, the notorious Harry Flashman, had a different take, "He wasn't much of a general; it was notorious he'd never read a line outside the Bible; he was so inarticulate he could barely utter any order hut 'Charge!;' his notions of discipline were to flog anything that moved.... But none of this mattered in the least because, you see, Hope Grant was the best fighting man in the world."25

  If he fit the bill as the eccentric British officer, he did not care. He was an accomplished musician and a deeply thoughtful man. It was said that he chose his aides and staff for their musical abilities so that the te dium of the long voyages around the world in the service of the queen could be relieved by his heart's delight. That he had become recognized the finest of the queen's generals only added to the image.

  Hope Grant had started his military life with the 9th Lancers in India, but he got his first foot on the ladder of fame as brigade-major to Lord Saltoun during the First China War. "Saltoun-a hero of Houge- mont [at Waterloo] in 1815-had selected Grant for both his military and musical abilities, he himself being a keen cellist." He came out of that war with Saltoun's patronage and the CB (Companion of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath). He added wars, decorations, and promotions relentlessly - from the Second Sikh War to the Great Mutiny where he commanded the 9th, then a brigade, and finally the cavalry division with great skill and uniform success in almost every one of the great actions of the war. He earned the KCB (Knight Commander of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath) and promotion to lieutenant general, and his lancers won no fewer than fourteen Victoria Crosses. His reputation won him the command of the expeditionary force in the Second China War of 1860, where he took the Taku Forts, routed the Chinese repeatedly in open battle, and took Peking. The loot from the imperial summer palace was immense, though he distributed his huge share to his men.

  He commanded the Madras Army in India 1862-63 and was then posted home to become Quartermaster General of the British Army. He did not even have time to get used to his title before Britain was plunged into war with America. His reputation in the Army and favor
with the queen guaranteed him the command of British forces in North America.

  Time had not rested heavily on his hands during the voyage. He had the original war plan against America developed during the Trent Affair to review as well as the astute studies of the Northern states that Wolseley had sent him. They were of even more current value now that British armies were holding Albany and besieging Portland. He was particularly interested in the maps of these areas, and of these the maps of Maine held his attention the most, for without Maine and its loop of the Grand Trunk Railroad, Canada could not be held. He was most interested in the ability of the Americans to relieve the siege of Portland and fully expected them to be undertaking it as he steamed across the pond. Cawnpore's destination had been Halifax, but he directed the captain to change course to Portland.

  Map study had not completely consumed his time. His devotion to God was as fully a part of him as his love of music. That devotion found him on the quarterdeck as a member of an officer string quartet playing for the crew and the 41st. They were not playing Mozart, Bach, or Vivaldi. Instead, the delicate and haunting music to Henry F. Lyte's 'Abide with Me" came from their instruments-a hymn beloved on both sides of the Atlantic since its writing in 1847. They were accompanied by a sweet voiced naval rating, and the beauty of their music floated upward like incense to the Almighty and seeped through the souls of the men crowding the deck: