He knew his own army was as besieged as the Army of the Cumberland, nailed to the surrounding heights, now worse supplied than the Union troops below, with miserable shelter against this hard, early winter. Already the sick lists were enormous. It was not in James Longstreet's nature to see his army waste away from sickness. He would lose more men this way than in a battle. A battle was preferable, especially one that could end the siege with the enemy's capitulation.
That's why he was down by Lookout Creek. The great cloudshrouded heights of Lookout Mountain towered above them as the men of his old corps massed for the blow that would shut up the enemy again, this time for good. A division of Sherman's corps faced them. Beyond their lines was Brown's Ferry, barely two miles away, across which life's blood flowed to the Army of the Cumberland. He was going to cut it and watch the enemy just bleed out.
His instrument, the most lethal offensive formation in North America, his mighty 1st Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, would be his instrument of slaughter. Their ranks had been dreadfully thinned by Gettysburg and Chickamauga, but he had every faith in the hard, lean men filing past him now.
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, LONDON, 2:30 PM, NOVEMBER 9, 1863
Disraeli sat on a green leather bench, the soul of calm, as the division of the House was announced. Parliament's method of voting had members counted as they came through one door signifying yea or another for nay, thus dividing.
The Liberal whips were as nervous as Disraeli was unmoved. Palmerston and Russell sitting opposite him appeared resigned to defeat. The clamor for their removal had shaken the pillars of the British establishment fast on the heels of the disaster at Claverack. Disraeli had done his subtle best to weaken those pillars in the public eye. Scandal had helped. Palmerston had had a randy reputation even into his old age. In the last few months, it has seemed he would be dragged into court over improper relations with a Mrs. Cane. "This prompted wags in the clubs of St. James to say of the septuagenarian Irish peer that, while she was certainly Cane, was he Able?"8
Now the entire Liberal political structure-Palmerston, Russell, Gladstone, and the rest-were pulled down by the weight of disaster, as if it were the temple whose house pillars had been snapped by a modern Samson. The analogy occurred to Disraeli, who relished its Old Testament ring.
The division was announced. Cheers thundered from the Tory and Radical benches. By a wide margin, the Liberals had lost a vote of confidence. Palmerston's ministry was dead. Now all that remained was for the queen to ask Disraeli to form a new government. He rose to speak. John Bright tried to catch his eye in this moment of their victory, but Disraeli looked away.
Men would later say it was his greatest speech. His once shrunken, used-up frame, his sharpened, wraith-like features, all seemed to melt away. Life flowed strong in him now, his black eyes glinted, and his movements were graceful, even elegant. His oiled hair shone, especially the curl so carefully draped over his forehead. He bowed slightly to the Speaker.
Bright's eyes glowed, then dimmed as he realized Disraeli was not giving the speech of peace. You could hear the drums roll in Disraeli 's cadences as he called the nation to war for the Empire:
I speak on this subject with confidence to the people of these isles because I know that they are men who are not ashamed of the empire which their ancestors created; because I know that they are not ashamed of the noblest of human sentiments, now decried by philosophers -the sentiment of patriotism; because I know they will not he beguiled into believing that that in maintaining their empire they may forfeit their liberties. One of the greatest of Romans, when asked what were his politics, replied, Imperium et Lib- ertas. They would not make a had program for a British Ministry. It is one from which Her Majesty's advisors will not shrink.9
It is said that the working class of this country does not support this war and would he glad to end it under any conditions. I say that the working classes of England are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness-that they are proud of belonging to an imperial country and are resolved to maintain the Empire of England. I say with confidence that the great body of the working class of England utterly repudiate such sentiments. They have no sympathy with them. They are English to the core. They repudiate such principles. They adhere to national principles. They are for maintaining the greatness of the Kingdom and the Empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our sovereign and members of such an empire. No Roman could have been prouder when he stated, "Civis Romanus sum!"10
Bright's self-control asserted itself. He coldly acknowledged Disraeli's mastery of the floor. He had severed the connection between freedom in America and the franchise at home and turned the issue into one of the bedrock patriotism of the working class and imperial glory. Disraeli 's comparisons between the empire of Rome and that of Britain were brilliant in attaching the rest of British society to war. Such comparisons invariably resonated deeply with a country steeped in classical education. He could see the effect in the faces of the members hanging on Disraeli 's every word:
It has been said that the people of this country are deeply interested in the humanitarian considerations involved in the issue of slavery. All must appreciate such feelings. But I am mistaken if there he not a yet deeper sentiment on the part of the people of this country, one with which I cannot doubt the House will ever sympathize, and that is -the determination to maintain the Empire of England."
That sentiment forbids the surrender of any part of that empire, particularly one in which Her Majesty's subjects are so thickly settled. British North America is as much a jewel in the crown of empire as is India. We would not abandon the latter during the Great Mutiny. We will not abandon the former in this Great War.
I will say to the nation that our aim is that embodied in the very name of our gracious sovereign-victory. We shall summon the might of this island race as our ancestors have in the past against the Armada and at Agincourt, Blenheim, Trafalgar, and Waterloo. We shall not fail history or posterity. Britannia shall he victorious."
Once again Bright remembered a phrase of Disraeli 's - "We are here for fame."
THE HOME OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT, NEW YORK CITY, 9:22 PM, NOVEMBER 8, 1863
Ensign Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov made love to the piano as his fingers danced across the keyboard. He was playing the "Intermezzo in Modo Classico" by his friend Modest Mussorgsky. The sensuous effect was not lost on the adoring young women in silk and crinoline who filled Vanderbilt's gilded music room 13
The performance of this good-looking young man with the shortcropped dark hair was a gift of the commander of the Russian squadron in New York Harbor, Rear Adm. Stefan Lisovsky, to his host, and most welcome it was. It would be the social event of the week. His audience also included the movers and shakers of New York society. Even Vanderbilt himself and his guest of honor had taken a break from their closeted meeting with the governor and both state senators to listen to him summon magic from the grand piano.
Half a world away, another piano's music had been silenced forever in an act of defenestration. In September, Polish revolutionaries in Warsaw had made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the Russian military governor of Poland. Russian soldiers then sacked and burned the Zamo- yski Palace for no other reason than their rage needed an object. As they rampaged through the grand old structure, they came across the piano of Frederick Chopin, who had once lived there. In a shower of broken glass, they had hurled it through a window to crash into the street below.
Now the street outside was the site of a gallows from which a dozen bodies swung in the cold wind that blew in from across the Russian steppes. On the gallows platform stood the Russian general commanding the suppression of the Polish Revolt, Mikhail Nikolayevich Muravyov. He personally fixed the noose on every Polish prisoner. Then Muravyov "the Hangman" stood back and grinned each time the trapdoor dropped.14
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C., 10:30 AM, NOVEMBER 9, 1863
A month had pas
sed since the dual victories at Washington and Claverack, with the belated news of Dahlgren's victory at Charleston making it a triple triumph of American arms. Vermillionville and Kennehunk were forgotten as a wave of elation surged through the North.
But Lincoln knew that Britannia's fist had only been warded off. Great Britain was still very much in the ring after this first round and doing much better than the victory celebrations warranted. That was the subject of Sharpe's formal report to the cabinet that morning. The report was something he called "National Strategic Estimate Number One." Much of what he said was known to his audience, but he tied it together into a coherent, seamless picture with a crisp objectivity that kept the studied attention of everyone at the table "s
Washington was half in ruins, many of its wounds concealed by the same blanket of snow that had shut down active operations along the Canadian border. The capital's role as the military logistics hub of the war had been broken. The premier arsenal of the Union was a ruin; the Navy Yard was hardly in better shape with its dry dock in ashes. The state of New York had been charred from Schenectady to Cold Spring. Its Upstate foundries and factories, as well as the arsenal at Watervliet, were heaps of rubble and ashes. Imports had ceased as the Royal Navy hovered off the coast.
For all the Navy's victory at Charleston, its blockade of the South had been shattered. The surviving ships of the North and South Atlantic Blockading Squadrons had poured into the safety of Norfolk, fighting their way past the Royal Navy's own blockaders with the monitors in the lead. It was only owing to the monitors that the Chesapeake Bay was not a British lake. But the Royal Navy had slammed the door to the sea shut on the U.S. Navy and the entire Eastern seaboard of the North as the heavy hand of its blockade settled in. Here the monitors were useless, for they dared not venture out into the heavy seas where the British watched. The Royal Navy was playing its trump. Where the balled fist had failed, the long, slow squeeze was far more dangerous. In past wars, it had strangled its opponents' commerce and confined their fleets to slow rust and rot in their ports through the inexorable pressure of blockade. And more than the U.S. Navy was shut up in its ports; the nation's merchant marine, the rival of Great Britain's, now swung idle at home, fled to neutral ports, or was hunted by the British and French navies off the oceans.
The South, now freed of its suffocating blockade, found its harbors from Wilmington to Savannah filled with British, French, and neutral ships gobbling up the three years of cotton harvest that was bursting from its warehouses. They brought in exchange a river of armaments and supplies that would banish tattered uniforms, bare feet, and empty haversacks from the Confederate armies. They also brought the iron rails and locomotives that would allow the South to begin rebuilding its worn-out rail system in order to bring its agricultural surplus to its armies. Britain's industrial base was ten times that of the North and could meet its own needs as well as the Confederacy's.
In the warm waters of the Gulf, there had been no victories to offset the bad news. The lightly armed West Gulf Blockading Squadron had been destroyed by the French off Galveston. The East Gulf squadron had fled into the safety of the Pensacola naval base. The French Navy now lurked off the mouth of the Mississippi. A pall had fallen over the cabinet room as Stanton announced the details of the French victory at Vermillionville. It was poor comfort that Bazaine's victory, coupled with that of the French Navy at Galveston, would create as much mortification in London as delight in Paris. What the first Napoleon had so fecklessly sold off, the third Napoleon seemed poised to snatch back. From Washington, the English and French seemed in firm alliance. It was an understandable conclusion at that point but one that failed to detect that the British had refused a formal alliance and were infinitely suspicious of French intentions. There was even less strategic coordination than with the Confederacy.
The effects of their reverses at Charleston, Washington, and Claverack, though, had caused London to be less fastidious about the French. The British cabinet had led the country to war on a wave of outrage over the Battle of Moelfre Bay, an outrage that had suppressed the natural sympathies for the Union held by significant parts of the British public and given full rein to the Confederate sympathies of the ruling and business classes. The unheard of reverses of British arms had stunned a nation that had come to assume that victory in battle was a national birthright. There were few voices that questioned the war. Yet they could be found and even at this early stage sought out-John Bright chief among them.
These doubts were only the faintest whispers drowned out by a nation and its empire that set themselves to the task ahead. Parliament voted vast sums for the war; factory, forge, shipyard, and recruiting station throbbed with energy and will of a great people at war. The British Empire, like the Roman, was an implacable and relentless enemy. The Royal Navy's ships converged from every far-flung station of empire. Garrisons were stripped of their troops. Only India, where the embers of the Great Rebellion still glowed hot in British memory, was not asked for a single man. The garrisons of Ireland and Great Britain had been denuded for the twenty-thousand-man reinforcement under Maj. Gen. Hope Grant that by now had arrived in Canada. The militia and volunteers were being called up to fill their empty garrisons. So heavy was the volunteering that hardly a vacancy could be found in the militia, yeomanry, and volunteers.
There were even fewer doubts in the American North. It was worth a man's life now to voice Copperhead sentiments. He would be lucky to live long enough to be arrested by the authorities. The movement's blatant treason had damned it beyond redemption. Sherman had completed his march through the Midwest, stamping out the last few holdouts and was on his way to reinforce Grant at Chattanooga. He left the region under martial law, a measure Lincoln approved and showed no rush to lift. Too many dead men had littered the streets from Dayton to Chicago to trust the civil courts and state governments to resume the function they had so clearly failed to execute.
As soon as Lee had retreated from Washington, Lincoln had called Congress back into session, but it had taken weeks for that body to effectively reconvene. In that time, Lincoln ruled by presidential order and none too shyly. One problem that had simply evaporated was conscription. The draft was effectively suspended by the flood of volunteers who oversubscribed state conscription quotas three and four times. Prominent men who had stayed aloof from the war, such as New York aristocrat Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., now raised new regiments out of their own pockets and gladly accepted the commissions to command them. Another social barrier had also been breached by the war: enlistment of black regiments on the same pay scale as white units was implemented without opposition. With one stroke, Lincoln made available at least another two hundred thousand men for military service.
The disruption of the country's financial markets was only just being felt as the blockade hampered access to international loans and made U.S. Treasury bonds sink to their lowest rating ever. Cornelius Vanderbilt led a group of the wealthiest men in the country to offer the government a gift of fifty million dollars and a loan of a hundred million more at no interest, an act of patriotism that buoyed the shaken Treasury and banking system. With that example, the wealthy men of the North rushed to more than double Vanderbilt's gift; others underwrote the complete cost of warships. More than a few of these astute men of business recognized the opportunity to boost domestic war industries and expected a healthy return on their patriotism. Lincoln also set in motion statehood for the territory of Nevada, whose gushers of gold and silver were keeping the United States afloat. That the territory did not meet the minimal constitutional requirement of population was dismissed as a bagatelle 16
The war imports that had done so much to arm the new armies of the Union in the first year of the war had been severed at one blow. But the danger point had already passed in the summer. By then the Northern arsenals and factories were producing a steady flood of first-class weapons, from small arms to artillery. Four thousand tons of niter had been stockpiled from British and Chil
ean imports, guaranteeing the ability to fight for at least a year.17
Lincoln's problem now was to restrain the fury of the public and press demanding an immediate invasion of Canada. Headlines screamed, "On to Canada!" "Avenge Albany!" and "Remember Maine!" A blizzard had fallen from Wisconsin to Nova Scotia with such force that the first act of the war was over. That primal force of nature had had no noticeable effect on the press.
The siege of Portland had become the focus of the war for both the Americans and the British. For the Americans, it was the piece of Northern territory still under enemy occupation. For the British, it was the only place where British arms had not been driven from the field and the site of their only clear-cut victory. New York demanded the relief of Portland as much as London demanded its fall. For the British in North America, its capture was of the utmost strategic importance as well. Should they fail, they would lose the connecting railroad link between the Maritimes and the Canadas. It was through the ports of Maine that Hope Grant's reinforcements had poured. The status of the garrison and inhabitants of Portland were much on the mind of the cabinet.
Long faces lined the cabinet room table -with the exception of Lincoln who seemed remarkably unperturbed, a fact Stanton commented upon. "Now, gentlemen, it is I who should have the long face," Lincoln replied. "Mrs. Lincoln has insisted we go to the theater now that, as she put it, 'It would show confidence in our victories.' There you have it. A little confidence in our victories would do the country a good turn. And don't think I won't have to struggle to put on that good face tonight. Mrs. Lincoln is all atwitter over this young actor, Booth. All the ladies are, I gather. I would prefer to see his brother Edwin play in Macbeth or Hamlet. I guess I will have to settle for The Marble Heart tonight. I understand Edwin Booth's little brother plays the villain."18
A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril an Alternate History Page 31