Time and again, the ship was threatened with disaster during the voyage. Heavy seas poured water through the ventilators, which were only six feet above the water, soaking the leather drive belts for the ventilators. The belts snapped, and the ventilators quit, cutting off the intake of fresh air. Quickly, engine fumes poisoned the air. Stimers led the engineering department into the engine room. Men dropped from the fumes as Stimers worked heroically to restart the ventilators, finally coaxing them back into haphazard operation.23
Just before the battle, the ship's engineer discovered that the pony wheel for the engine that operated the turret was rusted tight and could not be freed. Stimers, who had spent his youth turning wrenches, stepped forward and freed it. During the battle with its Confederate ironclad nemesis, CSS Virginia, Stimers had operated the turret and then the gunnery division when the executive officer had to assume command after the wounding of the captain. When the turret had frozen, he had freed it again by the main force of his powerful body. It was extraordinary combat achievement for an engineer to execute such operational responsibility, and he had come under the eye of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus "Gus" Fox, an observer of the battle.24
His stock had ridden high after the battle, and he found himself brought to Washington to supervise the construction of the new ships being built on the Monitor model and its product improvements. He quickly became a disciple of Ericsson's, and a triumvirate of Ericsson, Fox, and Stimers emerged dedicated to rapid production of new monitors of improved classes. The first such were the ten ships of the Ericsson-designed Passaic class. They were considerable improvements over the original Monitor and were constructed and delivered in record time. They had been the heart of Admiral Dahlgren's victorious battle line at Charleston. Stimers accompanied the first group of Passaics to join the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron's attack on Fort Sumter in April 1863 and stayed on to supervise their repair. By then he fully deserved the reputation as the Navy's "Mr. Ironclad."
With the success of Monitor and Passaic, the Navy leaped into the modern age and let contracts for a number of classes of new monitors. John Ericsson was again the foremost designer, and he provided the plans for a light-draft Monitor class (subsequently the Casco class), of a very simple design meant to penetrate the waterways that the draft of no conventional warship could attempt. Ericsson then concentrated on two leviathan monitors, Dictator and Puritan, and thereafter had little time to spare for the shallow-draft monitors.25
Stimers hoped to replicate the success of the Passiac class with the new Casco class and threw himself into the project with a praiseworthy intensity. Unfortunately, he was also seized with a desire to achieve a level of perfection in a new technology that was still groping forward. In effect, he sought to out-engineer John Ericsson and, in so overreaching, injected a level of complexity and confusion that contributed significantly to what happened at the Boston Atlantic Shipyard. He was constantly sending changes to the builders who were forced to tear out and replace already completed work. Unknown to anyone, significant errors were being made in the thousands of design computations done in Stimer's office.
The builders were also experiencing the confusion and miscalculations inherent in the introduction of a new technology on an unprepared and inexperienced industrial base. None of them had built an ironclad before or even an all-iron ship. They severely underestimated the machine tools and skill levels necessary in their workforce. By late 1862, the industrial base that Ericsson had estimated could absorb such programs with ease was beginning to run into trouble. Severe competition arose over materials, machine tools, and skilled labor. The Navy had also fecklessly let a number of contracts to shipyards on the Ohio River, failing to take into account that its seasonal rise and fall as well as its winter icing would decisively influence when the hulls could be floated and the ships moved. To add to the builders' attempts to cope with all this, the government's payment system imposed a growing financial burden that strained and then exhausted their credit.
For Stimers personally, the workload was overwhelming. As one historian would note, he was dealing with everything from pay disputes to shortages of bolts:
Simultaneously with altering the monitors in service, he was making similar changes on those under construction. He was providing both original and revised drawings for Tippecanoe-class and the light-draft (Casco-class) monitors. He was supervising twenty-nine Tippecanoes and Cascos as well as Ericsson's Dictator and Puritan. He was designing a "fast sloop of war ... and a twinturreted monitor. To top it off, he was subject to a court of inquiry. "Stimers cannot properly superintend the 6 vessels and the planning of others at the same time," Ericsson had opined over a year before, when Stimers had far fewer vessels to inspect. By the summer of 1863, the general inspector had been working at a killing pace for over eighteen months.26
All these issues came to a head as that first hull floated halfsubmerged with all the pathos of a dead whale. The stink traveled to Washington with such force that it brought the entire class to a halt as the Navy realized the extent of the disaster. The class that had absorbed the lion's share of money, materials, and manpower was an abject failure at the very moment when two enemy armies were marching through the United States and her coasts and ports were under tight blockade.
LAKE BORGNE, LOUISIANA, 1:50 PM, OCTOBER 21, 1863
The Tricolor snapped in the cool October breeze from the stern of the French ironclad Gloire as it steamed across the broad waters of Lake Borgne. The armed might of France had not flown its colors on this body since Napoleon I had sold Louisiana to the United States of Thomas Jefferson sixty years before. For the sailors, the very name was itself a piece of wry humor, for borgne meant "one-eyed" in French.
When named in the early eighteenth century, it had been a freshwater lake, but a century and a half of nature's fury and relentlessness had opened it to the Gulf of Mexico, and its water had become saline. Lake Pontchartrain lay to the north across a narrow neck of swamps and bayous and had almost direct access to New Orleans, but its canals and rivers were guarded by strong forts. Gloire and the flotilla of warships and transports ignored it and steamed west into Borgne. They had also ignored the traditional route to the great city up the winding Mississippi through its long delta. There too were the strong forts that Farragut had fought past to seize New Orleans the year before, but the forts were much more powerful now in Union hands.
Gloire had been the world's first ironclad, laid down in 1858, and had provoked the British to build the larger and more capable Warrior and Defence classes. The French ship was smaller than both at 5,530 tons; its thirty-six 6.4-inch breechloading rifled guns were less capable than the British Armstrong guns but more reliable. The British ships had been all iron-hulled while Gloire was a wooden hull clad with a casemate of 4.5-rolled wrought iron armor. The irony was that Gloire had been more successful than its British counterparts. The American monitors had sunk Black Prince, the second ship of the 9,200-ton Warrior class at Charleston only weeks before. Gloire and the four follow-on ironclads of her class had completely destroyed the U.S. Navy's unarmored West Gulf Blockading Squadron about the same time in the battle of Galveston. Behind Gloire was her sister ship, Couronne, the first iron-hulled French ship. Now both steamed on, their black guns also run out and crews at battle stations.27
Aboard Gloire, nervous Confederate lieutenant general Richard Taylor paced the captain's quarterdeck. When the French lookout shouted his sighting, Taylor swung his glass in that direction. Slowly, the threetired stone bulk of Fort Beauregard, looming over the small port of Proctorville, came into view one gallery at a time as the ship closed.
No alert sounded from the fort. It had never been completed and was now derelict; it and the town below had never recovered from the massive hurricane of August 1860. All that was left of Proctorville was matchwood and the end of the Mexican Gulf Railroad that ran up to New Orleans, a little less than thirty miles to the north. Black work crews were languidly bu
ilding a new pier and railroad terminal. Gloire and Couronne took station as close as the pilot said was prudent for their drafts, their guns covering what had once been a town. Small boats darted out from the ironclads to the beach. French Marines jumped into the surf and fanned out across the beach and into the town to clear it of a nonexistent enemy, completely ignoring the workers who took advantage of the unexpected work break to stare. A signal rocket reported all clear, and immediately the transports began lowering away dozens of small boats, soon filled with troops in faded gray and butternut. The boats scurried to the beach like a host of black water bugs.
One of the first to boats to hit the water had Taylor as a passenger. His eyes fixed on the beach, he only turned back to wave a friendly thank you to the French captain who had shouted, "Bonne chance, General Taylor!" Taylor had promised him the best dinner in New Orleans, and the captain had heard very good things about the wondrous Creole seafood cuisine.
Taylor pushed that thought to the back of his mind as his brigades sorted themselves out ashore. As soon as each regiment formed, he put them on the road north. Speed, speed, and more speed. Once taught by Jackson, a soldier always felt the need for speed. He had drummed it into his subordinate commanders and now was everywhere applying his formidable presence to wherever the movement off the beach and onto the road slowed. When two brigades were ashore and moving north, Taylor rode after them. The follow-on brigades and artillery would have to catch up. They would continue through the night, and with some hard marching he would be on the outskirts of a largely undefended New Orleans by the following night. The powerful Union army that would have stopped him cold was over a hundred miles to the west as the crow flew, fixated on Bazaine's Franco-Confederate army that had marched out of Texas.
Despite the pace of the march, the men enjoyed the cool and dry marching weather, so rare in Louisiana that it buoyed their morale and put a bounce in their step. Taylor put Mouton's brigade of Louisiana regiments in the van- the 18th and 25 Louisiana, the Crescent Regiment, and Fournet's and Beard's battalions. They were marching home, and it quickened their stride even more than the weather. The Texas brigades behind, no slouches at hard marching, had to hurry to keep up. The real bounce, though, came from the sense that they were going to be in on the kill after so much frustration and defeat. They could taste it.
The prize, the first city of the South and entrepot for the entire watershed of the Mississippi, was in their grasp. Its capture by the Union in April 1862 had been the first great crippling blow the North had inflicted on the Confederacy. The fall of the great river forts from Vicksburg to Port Hudson in July had, in Lincoln's words, allowed the "Mother of waters to run unvexed to the sea." Taylor was determined to vex Mr. Lincoln all over again .21
BRASHEAR CITY, LOUISIANA, 2:00 PM, OCTOBER 21, 1863
The main Union supply base in Brashear City should have been as impregnable as a fortress with all the advantages afforded by surrounding nature. The town lay sixty-five miles slightly southwest from New Orleans on the Opelousas and Great Western Railroad. There the tracks ended, and supplies were conveyed to Banks's army by wagon train along the main road that continued north another fifty-five miles up to Vermillionville and then west again to Texas. The first twenty-five miles was a narrow strip of land between Grand Lake to the north and impenetrable swamps, marshes, and bayous to the south. Winding back and forth like the coils of a snake was the marshy Bayou Teche, offering an endless series of chokepoints to even a moderately determined defender.
When Maj. Gen. Thomas Green, commanding a division of two thousand five hundred Texas cavalry, arrived at Indian Village just beyond this twenty-five mile naturally defended corridor, he had accomplished Bazaine's order to cut Banks's communications with his main supply base. Bazaine had overestimated the attention Banks would pay to the defense of the mountains of supplies accumulating at Brashear City. Instead, he had left a green brigade recently arrived from the North. The local country people swarmed to Green to tell him that almost the entire Yankee force was concentrated at Brashear City and none too alert.
Green did not hesitate. He put his regiments in motion immediately. To the shock of the Union teamsters in the long wagon trains, his lead units galloped past them, not even bothering to stop and accept their surrender, which was later taken by the regiments bringing up the rear. On the Texans galloped, so fast that they outraced the very news of their coming.29
VERMILLIONVILLE, LOUISIANA, 2:22 PM, OCTOBER 21, 1863
Banks never knew what hit him that afternoon. Bazaine's attack crashed into his army all along the line. The French general had reduced his tactical problem to a very simple point-it would be a shoving match with all the odds on his side. Banks could shove him westward all he wanted; the ground stretched easily and unimpeded for mile after empty mile. He would simply be falling back on his communications. However, Bazaine had only to shove Banks's corps east for a tenth of a mile before they were pushed into Lake La Pointe or fell off a short, steep plateau into the shallow river that fed into the lake at its base. Should they struggle out of that, their retreat east would carry them into the marshy waters of Bayou Teche, and beyond that Lake Grand. A very simple problem indeed.
Banks's army was positioned in line of battle on a north-south axis just east of the main road leading north from Vermillionville. Major General Franklin's XIX Corps was on the right flank, with XIII Corps on the left and the cavalry held in reserve.
Banks may have been an amateur who rejected Franklin's sound advice, but his two corps were veterans, and Bazaine's army felt their bite immediately. But they were victims of a saying by Alexander the Great's canny father, Phillip II-an army of deer commanded by a lion will always beat an army of lions commanded by a deer. They also suffered from the damned had luck of fighting an army of lions commanded by a lion. Banks almost immediately proved the long-dead Macedonian correct by losing control of the battle. He forgot, if he had ever learned, that the primary role of the commander in battle is the allocation of the reserve. So, when Washburn tried to relieve the quickly depleted brigade on the right of his corps, Banks countermanded the order for the replacement brigade to move into the line. However, Banks never countermanded Washburn's original order for the brigade in contact to pull out.
The Prince de Polignac saw the confusion in the opposing firing line as it filed away to the rear, leaving a gaping hole. He rode to the front of his two regiments, pointed his sword to the void in the enemy line, and shouted, "En avant, mes enfants!" and in English, "Go, get'em, boys!" The Texans responded with high-keening Rebel yells, borrowed in admiration from their mortal Comanche enemies on the wild frontier. At the sound, the neighboring French Zouaves instinctively paused in their firing; it was savage and alien to their military style and experience. The Yankees were all too familiar with it.
The Texans raced through the opening. Franklin was not even aware of what was going on. He had all he could do trading hammers and blows with Walker's Greyhounds. His men were Grant's veterans of the Vicksburg Campaign, but they had never seen such hard fighting. It was Franklin's great good luck that Polignac rolled up the flank of XIII Corps instead of turning north against his own corps. Struck from flank and rear, Washburn's brigades came apart. The prince was riding the foaming crest of a tidal wave, his colors party desperately trying to keep up with him. His Texans, exultant in their success, followed the gallant chevalier of France as his ancestors had followed the plume of Henry IV. There was no doubt that they were led by a fighting man who met every standard of Texican manhood.
So when they saw him lurch back in the saddle, his sword flying from his hand, a groan rose from their ranks. His aide was beside him in an instant to prevent him from falling from his horse. Men rushed up on foot to ease him to the ground. His regiments rushed by, stabbing with their bayonets and bludgeoning the fleeing mass of panicked men in blue. Bazaine watched in awe. He thought he had seen everything. He said to his staff, "You see, messieurs, the furor Texicus. Consi
der it your privilege to have witnessed it." He paused only for the briefest moment, then announced. "Now I shall commit my reserve." He called forward the commander of the Imperial Guard Zouave regiment and pointed farther down the Union line that was now showing the effects of the disaster rolling up their flank. "There, Colonel Moreau, there is where you will strike, and they will fly apart."
On the open southern flank of the battle, the two great cavalry hosts faced each other. Bazaine had placed his cavalry there to tell the enemy plainly that his line of communications had been cut. That does wonders for an enemy's confidence, he knew, and it had done just that, sending excited shouts through the XIII Corps regiments along the line as the French were advancing rapidly on them from their front. Banks had been provoked to bring his cavalry division of almost three thousand men out of reserve. He gave Brig. Gen. Albert Lee the order to drive the enemy cavalry from the field. Lee would have suggested, had Banks been anything but visibly panicked, that he now deal with the French cavalry as dismounted infantry employing their Sharps breechloading carbines to bring down so many that they would have to move off. Instead, he found himself drawing his saber and riding to the head of his thirteen regiments.
Across the field, the French commander also drew his saber as his Chasseurs a Cheval, hussars, and lancers sat stock still waiting for the command. The French would have been outnumbered had the cavalry of Harrison's brigade not reinforced them. The Texans were not used to the massed cavalry action that clearly was shaping up, but they were game for anything. While the French thought in terms of their sabers and lances, the Texans felt the handles of their revolvers.
A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril an Alternate History Page 10