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

by Peter G. Tsouras

  Here again Lee was most helpful. His intelligence indicated that only the Rodmans had been emplaced. He suggested that if he were able to take Alexandria and Battery Rogers, Washington would be defenseless from attack up the river.

  First they had to overcome one other major obstacle before getting to Washington, and it was just up the river from where Cooke's Brigade was loading. It was the massive masonry fortification of Fort Washington on the Maryland side of the river. It commanded the channel sixteen miles below Washington and would be difficult to pass. It stood high on a hill with its guns pointing directly at any hostile ship coming up the river. Just below the fort, the main ship channel took a turn directly toward it to pass right under its walls. Its many guns would be firing down to strike through the decks. Ships' guns, in turn, could not be elevated sufficiently to strike that high. Sink two or three ships in the channel, and they could block it for the rest.

  But again, Lee was helpful. He said that as much as it pained him to associate the name Washington with failure, the fort had an ignominious history. In 1814, when Admiral Cochrane's ships had come up the river, the fort's commander had lost his nerve, spiked his guns, and fled, giving free passage to the Royal Navy. Lee suggested the fort might be better addressed from the landward side. After all, he had heard that the Royal Marines had seized Fort Gorges in Portland Harbor by just such a bold move. He offered to assist by providing men whose accents would not be thought amiss at night by the guards. Lee added, "You might learn from our own misfortune at Vicksburg, when the Union Navy ran the forts at night with scarcely a loss."

  Milne came away from his conference with Lee confident. He had always favored this plan, but now its odds had gone up considerably. He was sure that by striking both by land and river at the same time, the chances of actually taking the city rose to the realm of the possible. And that would surely end the war at a single stroke. 6

  CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE, 2:00 AM, OCTOBER 28, 1863

  The cigar fell out of Grant's mouth. He had lit it after his aide woke him to say Thomas and his intelligence officer were insistent to see him. Colonel Rawlins had not been far behind. "You're serious?" Grant asked, incredulity written over his face.

  The captain almost smirked. "Absolutely, sir. The information comes from interrogations of deserters from every corps in the Army of Tennessee, from intercepts of Confederate signals, and from one of the headquarters staff body servants."

  Rawlins just burst out laughing and slapped his thigh with his hat. "I'll be damned! Just shot him, you said?"

  "Yes, sir. It seems that Forrest warned Bragg right after Chickamauga. Barged right into his tent, fury on his face, at Bragg's refusal to let him pursue Rosecrans. He cornered Bragg in the back of his tent, and said, 'I ought to slap your face and make you resent it. Don't you ever give me another order!"'

  Bragg's problem had not been limited to Forrest's outrage. He had completely lost the confidence of his corps commanders, who had been alienated by his acid tongue, ornery disposition, and hesitation in battle. He had especially angered Longstreet, who had won the battle for him. All four corps commanders had begged Bragg to pursue Rosecrans as the Army of the Cumberland had disintegrated and fled the field, save for the obdurate Thomas and his command. They even produced a private who had been captured early in the battle and had escaped in the confusion of the rout to describe the chaos. Bragg had sneered at him and asked, "What qualifies you to identify a retreat?"

  The private had shot back, "Because I've campaigned with you all summer."

  After serving with Lee, Longstreet could have only contempt for Bragg. He had then done the unthinkable for a general. He persuaded the other corps commanders to join him in an official request to Jefferson Davis that he relieve Bragg. Davis had been so alarmed that he had rushed to Tennessee to mediate the fate of his friend and confidant from their Army days. The evidence damned Bragg, but no general would put himself forward to seek command, unwilling to be tainted with ambition's stab in the back. Davis took the easiest course and the one he had wished to take; he confirmed Bragg in command. Davis had to give a sop to Longstreet, who refused to serve under Bragg. He gave permission for him to take his corps on an independent operation to take Lexington, Kentucky.

  Emboldened by this backhanded statement of support, Bragg attempted to relieve Forrest, the most feared cavalry commander in the Confederate Army. Of course, he had not so lost his wits as to try to relieve Forrest in person. He had sent an aide with the order and then promptly found a reason to inspect the siegeworks farthest from Forrest's command. Finding Bragg was no problem for the legendary Yankee hunter. Mounted on his black stallion, he overtook Bragg and his staff on a forest road.

  One blow of Forrest's gauntlets across Bragg's face nearly unseated him from his horse. Forrest grabbed him by the golden stars on his collar and threw him to the ground. His own bodyguard had immediately drawn down on Bragg's stunned staff. "I told you, you miserable cur, never to give me another order." He dismounted with the fluid grace of a predator and took the dazed Bragg by the collar again and dragged him down the road. Then he walked back twenty paces and turned. "I have slapped your face, Bragg. Now you have the opportunity to reply like a man." Bragg just shook, his terror-wide eyes owling above his gray-streaked bearded face. "Draw your pistol, sir, or I will shoot you down in the road."

  The two groups of horsemen broke their mesmerized attention to rush their mounts into the woods. No one wanted to be on the road when shots were fired.

  Forrest drew his pistol, raised and cocked it. Bragg soiled himself. His hand trembled as he drew his own sidearm. Forrest said to his aide, "Kindly count to three." Then to Bragg, "You know the rules. Defend yourself at three."

  "ONE ... TWO ... THREE!"

  In one fluid motion, Forrest's arm extended and he fired. Bragg screamed and fell onto the road holding his boot. Forrest had purposely shot him in the foot.

  He turned his back as his orderly brought up his horse. As he mounted, he said to on one in particular, "That creature needs some attention," and off he galloped.

  Grant just shook his head as he relit his cigar. "Thought I'd heard everything," but he was already thinking of Longstreet, Bragg 's successor. Grant grew thoughtful and gave a long pull on the cigar. "Too had I had counted on General Bragg to keep on helping us." Longstreet, who had been best man at his wedding, would take a lot of beating. If any man was to go down bristle end first, it would be him. Grant wouldn't put it past his old friend to actually win.

  HUDSON, NEW YORK, 3:00 AM, OCTOBER 28, 1863

  In the morning darkness, British troops arrived in the burned-out shell of Port Hudson. Paulet had cause to regret the torching of the town; it now served as a poor base upon which to anchor his campaign against Hooker. Amid the blackened walls there was scarcely a single whole roof to cover a hospital or headquarters, much less the supplies and munitions that would need care from the elements. There were still enough people living among the ruins to act as guides to show the way to the top of Academy or Prospect Hill just south of town. It was the dominant terrain and would give an observer a view for miles inland as well as to the north over the rolling farmland and wooded hills.

  Once motivated, Lord Paulet was all speed. He immediately set in motion his small army, "The Albany Field Force," to deploy thirty miles south of Albany to Hudson. He began shuttling them quickly by boat and railroad, faster and easier than a hard march overland. By the end of the next day, he would have almost twenty-two thousand men there. He was determined to block and defeat Hooker on this spot. It was clear that had he waited for Hooker in Albany, the American would simply swing east and cut the railroad that connected him to Montreal. He would be trapped. If he then were to hold Albany, he had to do it from a point much farther south. He would anchor himself on the river. Maybe ten miles or less to the east of Hudson, the gentle, rolling countryside rose suddenly in steep, wooded hills to meet Berkshire County in neighboring Massachusetts. But just south of H
udson, the terrain narrowed to three miles between the hills south of the port and the rising ground to the east. Even that narrow avenue of approach was conveniently bisected by a large body of water, Bell Pond, at Linlithgo Mills.

  Nature had made a fine bottleneck for the British, and Paulet had determined to cork it. Hooker would have this relatively narrow route to cross if he wanted to attack Albany or cut British communications with Canada. This was the best place for Paulet to meet and defeat him. If Hooker wanted to play a game of maneuver on this restricted stage of hill and dale, Paulet could play that, too. Five miles southeast of Hudson lay the village of Claverack with a creek of the same name curling south of it and turning north as it reached the high ground south of Hudson. Four miles south was Linlithgo Mills. Claverack would make a good forward headquarters. If he had time, he would throw his army into building in miniature the Lines of Torres Vedras, the strings of forts and trenches that Wellington built in Portugal to stall an invading French army in 1809. He would then let Hooker mark time until the winter snows shut down operations for the year. He rather liked the idea of copying the Iron Duke. He would be sure to hint at the comparison.

  Paulet took comfort in the fact that his men were fresh and had suffered few casualties, other than in the affair at Cold Spring. His Imperial and Canadian battalions were at almost full strength, unlike their American counterparts whose units had been shrunk from battle and disease to small remnants of their original number. A veteran American regiment was lucky to have four hundred men. The Imperial battalions numbered just under a thousand men, about the size of many war-shrunken Union brigades. They had had been reinforced by drafts from their depots to full strength. Proper camp hygiene and good medical care had kept the wastage low, and there had been only a handful of deserters. The Canadian battalions numbered about five hundred men at full strength, which most of them were. Paulet had been surprised when Wolseley told him that the Americans had no real system for the replenishment of their regiments. General McClellan, that great organizer, had set one up, but Secretary of War Stanton had discontinued it in 1862, thinking that the war would be over quickly and that the troops on hand would suffice to win the war.

  As Wolseley had explained, the Americans could not bring themselves to plan for a long war. Thereafter, instead of recruiting replacements, the various state governors simply raised new regiments, an enormous source of patronage. As the old regiments melted away from casualties and disease, their combat experience disappeared with them. New and inexperienced regiments took their place. The new men, unable to learn from veterans at their elbows, made all the same mistakes over again-at great cost. The Confederates had stopped raising new regiments when they had instituted a draconian conscription in 1862 and sent the conscripts and volunteers to the old, established formations. That helped explain their unusually high combat effectiveness.

  The only exception to the state policy of raising new regiments was Wisconsin. Luckily, he would face none of them; they were all in the West.' Instead, he would face a large number of Germans whose sad propensity to being routed when their flanks were turned he looked forward to repeating.

  Paulet was a creature of Army politics and a member of the Guards clique; his regiment was the Coldstream Guards, a battalion of which he had recently commanded. Despite this, he was not the sort who thought a good turnout weighed far more than brains. He knew his way around a battlefield better than most Guardsmen, who seldom deployed on active campaigning. He had served throughout the Crimean War and had had a horse shot out of him at the Battle of Alma. He also knew Hooker's reputation as a fighting general who had failed in independent campaign when his opponent had seized the moral ascendancy. Wolseley had been the source of this intelligence of the enemy -a useful man, useful, indeed.8

  CLAVERACK, NEW YORK, 3:10 AM, OCTOBER 28, 1863

  The Wolverines, as the men of Brig. Gen. George Armstrong Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade liked to call themselves, rode into the sleepy crossroads town. Only the brigade scouts had preceded their twentythree-year-old, yellow-haired general. Aggressive beyond a fault, a natural leader with a gift for seizing the main chance, Custer had been jumped from lieutenant to brevet brigadier by Meade just before Gettysburg. Anxious to put pugnacious young men in command of cavalry, the normally cautious Meade had taken full advantage of the authority to promote talent, given to him by a terrified Washington. Meade had never regretted the decision. In repeated charges, Custer had blunted Stuart's courageous cavalry maneuver against the Union rear on the third day of Gettysburg. Meade did regret, however, that the cavalry division with Custer and his Wolverines had been sent to reinforce Hooker.

  More scouts went out in the direction of Hudson as well as north. Hooker's orders were to find the British. His last reports put Paulet still in Albany, which was just too good to be true. One does not normally ascribe folly to an enemy, and Hooker would have been delighted for Paulet to stay in Albany to he stranded when his communications were cut, but he did not think his enemy would be so obliging. Custer's job was to throw light on this quandary.

  That was also Capt. John McEntee's problem. McEntee had been Sharpe's deputy before Lincoln had pulled him to Washington. As McEntee was another son of the Hudson Valley, Sharpe knew he was the right man to put Hooker's intelligence support in place. Energetic, precise, shrewd, honest to a fault, and dedicated to the service of the Republic, McEntee had added implacable revenge to his characteristics when he rode with Hooker and Meagher through the ruins of Rondout, his hometown. With him were a half dozen scouts who had been chosen from the Army of the Potomac. They were all New York men like McEntee. Their chief was the six-foot-tall, red-haired, pockmarked Sgt. Judson Knight, now chief of scouts for the Army of the Hudson, a man whose wits were as fast as his reflexes in a gunfight. With him was Martin Hogan, a young Irishman no older than Custer himself and as game as Knight.'

  Luck would take Knight and Hogan toward Hudson that early morning. They had barely gone a mile when they came across a boy of ten on horseback. He pulled up fast when he saw them, turned his horse, and put his heels into its side to race back into the dark. He had barely got a dozen yards when Hogan's hand reached over to grab the reins and pulled them up short. "Well, hoyo, and where would you he going at a time when you should be snug in your bed?"

  He grinned at the wide-eyed boy who pulled at the reins and shouted, "Let me go, you English bastard!"

  Hogan was truly at a loss for words, a most unusual thing for an Irishman. He didn't know what to he more shocked at-being called an English bastard or being called an English bastard by a ten-year-old. He hadn't even gotten around to considering the enormity of the boy's insult.

  Knight rode up. "Now, Martin, don't scare the lad. But, son, that is a mighty good question my friend just asked."

  Knight's Upstate New York accent seemed to relieve the boy. "You're an American?"

  "Sure am, boy, and Upstate born and bred. And U.S. Army, too." The boy looked askance at their civilian clothes.

  "Don't let these clothes put you off. Now why are you about at this hour?"

  "The English are in Hudson, sir!" the boy blurted out. "Hundreds of them. More and more keep landing from boats and getting off the train, too."10

  WASHINGTON NAVY YARD, 3:15 AM, OCTOBER 28, 1863

  Lowe, with the eager Zeppelin still in tow, had come back across the river at nightfall. The balloons had come down with the sun, but he had more work to do. Two of his six balloons were still held in reserve at the Navy Yard, and he wanted to see them ready to go up the next morning. It took at least three hours of preparation to produce the pure hydrogen gas necessary to lift a balloon, and he needed to start now if they were to go up by early morning.

  Not only were the designs of Lowe's balloons superior to anyone else's, but he was the only one to design the support vehicle mounting the equipment, the Lowe Generator, that could produce the necessary hydrogen. By doing this, he had made the Balloon Corps truly mobile, able to f
ollow the Army anywhere its normal wagons could go. His headquarters was the Navy Yard because it was there that the hydrogenproducing equipment was built by the Yard mechanics who seemed to be able to turn their hands to anything.

  The Lowe Generator was a strong, wooden, metal-reinforced tank set on a standard Army escort wagon. Auxiliary boxes for the complex processes of cooling and purifying the gas were connected by copper couples and a short rubber hose:

  The process for making gas with this apparatus was simple and rapid. It required, however, a thorough knowledge of the proper mixture of materials, and careful handling of the equipment. For a single inflation, four barrels of fine iron filings or borings, each weighing approximately 834 pounds, or a total of 3,300 pounds, were introduced into the tank through the manhole at the top. This material was spread as evenly as possible. The tank was then filled with water to within about two feet from the top. This done, the manhole was closed and the wingknohs tightly fastened. Ten carboys of sulphuric acid, averaging 161 pounds each, or a total of approximately 1,600 pounds, were poured into the tank by means of a siphon inserted into the cooper funnel. The siphon was made of lead, to resist attack by the acid. The acid was fed in according to a prescribed schedule and rate: five carboys at first, followed by a waiting period equal to the time expended in pouring the acid; then three more carboys, followed by a second time interval; and finally the remaining two carboys. The times delays between pouring were adopted to prevent too rapid a generation of gas, which might strain the walls of the tank. The generated gas then passed through the copper elbow coupling at the forward end of the rubber hose which conveyed it into the water cooler, from which it again passed into the lime purifier which absorbed the impurities and foreign gases. As a result, the gas which flowed from the lime solution into the balloon was almost pure hydrogen."