Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History

by Peter G. Tsouras

  “Come to your senses, Big Jim.” Stidger’s voice was about as even as Smoke had ever heard. “Of course, I wrote it. They think I work for them, and I give them just enough truth to make me believable. I am working under Vallandingham’s instructions.” Smoke was listening, he could tell. He had captured his attention by dropping the biggest name in the Copperhead movement. Now he had only to play it out and make him doubt. “Look at the date, man. I wrote that the raid would be on the twelfth not the second. Check it.” Stidger was counting on the split second distraction for Big Jim to look at the letter again in which to draw his own pistol. Instead, Big Jim pulled his trigger. The bullet’s sound muffled in the young man’s middle. It severed his spine as it spewed blood and bone out behind him in fiery tongue, and he fell like a rag doll.

  “Good try, traitor. But if you had meant the twelfth, you should not have written the second.” The light had not entirely gone out of Stidger’s eyes when Big Jim kicked him in the face. He paused long enough to wipe his bloody shoes on the corpse and then crossed the street. By then, most of the five thousand new Springfield rifles had been loaded into the waiting wagons and were disappearing into the gloom.

  OFF CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, 2:15 PM, AUGUST 5, 1863

  The greatest of the great white sharks made the cold waters off the Cape of Good Hope their home. These primal killing machines now had competition from an even deadlier killing machine, man. The CSS Alabama was an iron-hulled steamer, 220 feet long and 32 feet across her beam, three-masted, and bark-rigged with powerful engines that sent her sleek hull through the water at thirteen knots. Six gun ports pierced each side. She was circling her helpless forty-fifth victim, a small Yankee bark, Sea Bride, close inshore. The entire population of Cape Town had decamped to the shore to watch the spectacle of death on the water. A reporter for the Cape Argus described the hunt.

  The Yankee came around from the southeast, and about five miles from the Bay, the steamer came down upon her. The Yankee was evidently taken by surprise.

  Like a cat, watching and playing with a victimized mouse, Captain Semmes permitted his prize to draw off a few yards, and then he upped steam again and pounced upon her. She first sailed around the Yankee from stem to stern, and stern to stem again. The way that fine, saucy, rakish craft was handled was worth riding a hundred miles to see. She went around the bark like a toy, making a complete circle, and leaving an even margin of water between herself and her prize.14

  There was more than a little glee mixed in with the excitement. The sentiment in this colony of the British Empire, on which the sun never set, reflected the mother country’s political prejudices as closely as they parroted the latest fashions—contempt for the Yankees and admiration for the Confederates. Cape Town’s elite was already in competition to invite the Alabama’s captain, the famous Capt. Raphael Semmes, into their homes. To the rage of the U.S. consul, the city prepared to fete the captain and his officers even before the Alabama had made its kill.

  The Confederate commerce raider finished toying with its prey and sent over a boat to fetch its captain and his sailing papers. The defeated captain climbed aboard stone-faced, his life in ruins. He owned his ship; it was his home as well as his livelihood. Semmes greeted him cordially before reviewing his papers. The Sea Bride’s captain observed him as he read. Semmes was a thin, wiry man, all sinew and determination. His already famous waxed mustache protruded at right angles for three inches from either side of his face.

  Semmes looked up. “I declare the Sea Bride a prize of war, Captain. I will send a prize crew to take her. You and your crew I will land in Cape Town.” The man held no hope of escape; his manifest clearly declared his cargo of machinery to be the property of American merchants. What sickened him though was the thought that Semmes might burn her, his home of so many years, as the captain of the Alabama had done to so many whalers. Their oil-soaked timbers had created vertical infernos floating on the sea, visible for great distances, and had become a specter haunting every American ship’s captain. The Alabama had hunted for less than a year, and already she had spread terror through the American shipping world, driving insurance rates skyward and giving owners no alternative but to reflag, sell their ships to foreign owners, or face ruin at sea. Bit by bit, Semmes was breaking Yankee commerce on the high seas.

  The world was already putting the praise of the Alabama to song in a dozen languages. As Semmes sailed into Cape Town Harbor, the locals were already singing in Afrikaans, “Daar kom die Alabama, die Alabama kom oor die see.” It would become a local legend that would endure for more than one hundred years.15

  2.

  Russell and the Rams

  WASHINGTON NAVY YARD, WASHINGTON, D.C.,10:20 AM, AUGUST 6, 1863

  Gus Fox was not the sort of man to wait on events much less on other men. The assistant secretary of the Navy was a burly, powerful man, with a bushy mustache-goatee that bristled with power. He bent events to his will as the foundries did that shaped the great flat slabs of armor plate into the rounded turrets of his beloved Monitors. On this day he was waiting for one man as he paced the Navy Yard’s Anacostia River dock, and a naval lieutenant at that.

  Whenever Fox appeared at the Yard, a primal energy was unleashed. Adm. John Dahlgren, during his time as superintendent of the Yard, had had the self-confidence and connections with Lincoln to withstand and guide Fox’s enthusiasm. But his successor, Capt. Andrew Harwood, was not as well connected and knew it. He would pay Fox the courtesies his dignity allowed and then get back to his own work and leave the Assistant Secretary to whatever had brought him to the Yard. Fox understood the game and played it well. Being the brother-in-law of the Postmaster General and the son-in-law of a major figure in the Republican Party had been the trick that landed him the job. That he was uniquely qualified for it was not something that American patronage politics encouraged, but this time it had hit a bull’s-eye.

  Everyone knew that Gideon Welles was the Secretary of the Navy. Everyone also knew that Fox was the Navy. Secretary Welles stuck to policy and left the conduct of actual operations to Fox, who had the complete confidence of the officer corps. He was, after all, one of their own. A former naval officer, he resigned during the service doldrums of the 1850s, but the war had drawn him back like a magnet.

  In late 1860, as the issue of war or peace had hung in the balance and the new President and his cabinet struggled with whether to relieve Fort Sumter, Fox had figured out the how and threw the plan into Lincoln’s lap. It was hardly his fault that the relief expedition he accompanied had arrived in Charleston Harbor just as the Confederates began the bombardment of the fort. Fox had the dubious honor of escorting the surrendered garrison home. That experience only fueled his aggressive and energetic nature. He had suggested and organized the first important naval success of the war by seizing Port Royal in South Carolina and turning it into the Navy’s forward operating base without which the blockade could not have been maintained so far south.

  Lincoln had been overjoyed that the Navy had pulled such a beautiful rabbit out the hat when most news had reeked of bitter frustration and failure. If Dahlgren was close to Lincoln, now so was Fox. He had piled high his credit with the President with his enthusiastic support of John Ericcson’s famous Monitor and especially of the follow-on class, the Passaics. Those ships formed the fighting core of Dahlgren’s force off Charleston. Another larger class of shallow-draft monitors, the Casco class, was now abuilding along the Atlantic coast and along the Ohio.

  Fox was not one to hoard his credit. He wagered it freely on new games as they came up. He was ruthless and arrogant, but admirals had more to fear from those features than lieutenants did. He was also an instinctive fighter, seized new ideas and opportunities, and could size up good men in a snap.

  One such man was on the bridge of the Nansemond gliding up to the dock. Fox liked such men and gave them bigger and bolder commands. There were plenty of commands to go around in a navy that had mushroomed so quickly in size—an
d not nearly enough bold and lucky men to take them. The evidence of that lucky boldness was the prize trailing behind Lamson’s Nansemond. She was the British blockade-runner, the Margaret and Jesse. Lamson had caught her off Wilmington, where his luck had blossomed. He had come across her low in the water with a heavy cargo of lead—those deadly accurate Whitworth breach-loading rifled guns and enough ammunition to keep them firing for years. The weight of her cargo had been her undoing. Built as a British mail packet, the iron-hulled, side-wheeler Margaret and Jesse was the only ship afloat able to do sixteen knots, but slowed by the greed of her cargo, Nansemond had fallen on her like a hawk.

  Lieutenant Lamson knew Fox by sight. Any aggressive officer among the blockading and river fighting squadrons along the Atlantic coast was sure to have met Fox. As the ship came alongside the dock, Fox took the time to examine the sleek ship coming up to dock outboard of Nansemond. Then his eyes moved to the bridge and locked on Lamson’s.

  “Captain, come ashore immediately. I must speak with you,” Fox’s voice boomed. Lamson bounded down the gangplank as soon as it hit the dock. He took Fox’s extended hand and found the older man was trying to crush it as he grinned at him. Lamson smiled back and met grip with grip until Fox let go. “Good to see you again, young man. A fine prize.” He looked thoughtful for a moment and said, “You may not have seen the last of her.” He motioned to the carriage nearby. “We must hurry. You are wanted at the White House.

  BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD STATION, WASHINGTON, D.C., 10:30 AM, AUGUST 6, 1863

  The lieutenant saluted. “Colonel Sharpe?” he asked the officer who had just stepped off the train car. George H. Sharpe was on the short side of medium height, round shouldered, and with a walrus mustache, a plain, even homely looking thirty-five-year-old man and not a very martial figure by any means. He was a man you could easily miss—until he spoke, that is.

  “Lieutenant, I am Colonel Sharpe.” The young man was taken aback at the transformation. Sharpe’s face had brightened with a disarming smile and his blue-gray eyes sparkled with good humor.

  “I am to take you to the White House, sir, by direction of the Secretary of War.”

  Sharpe reflected that life was getting more and more interesting as the carriage clattered down Pennsylvania Avenue. He had been summoned by the iron-willed Secretary to Washington with no explanation from his staff position at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac at Brandy Station in Virginia, the furthest point of the Army’s advance after Gettysburg. He had met the formidable Edwin McMasters Stanton before. His duties had taken him to Washington repeatedly before Gettysburg, and he had briefed Stanton any number of times. He knew that the Secretary of War was a force of nature, single-minded will personified. Stanton had come to national prominence shortly before the war when he had defended Dan Sickles for shooting his wife’s lover dead right outside the White House and won the case by advancing the insanity defense for the first time in American legal history. Because of those briefings, Stanton had acquired a taste for what Sharpe had to say.

  Sharpe, a slope-shouldered man from Kingston, New York, was unique in any number of ways. He was a Hudson Valley aristocrat, sophisticated and cosmopolitan. He was one of the best-educated men in the country, with degrees from Rutgers and Yale Law School. He had been the chargé at the Vienna legation and was something of a linguist, fluent in Latin and French. His mousy exterior gave no indication that he liked to have good time. A connoisseur of fine food and wine, he was not above staggering back from the Irish Brigade’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration tight as a tick. He also had a mind as sharp as an obsidian razor.

  When Joseph Hooker had blown into the command of the Army like a cleansing wind, Sharpe had been his inspired choice for something new. Hooker had been that transformational man who had leapt out of an old paradigm into the new. With a taste for the value of military intelligence, he had experimented with various collection means as a division and corps commander. When he became Army commander, he did something unique. Heretofore, commanding generals had been their own intelligence officers, a role that had worked for great commanders like Washington when armies were small. Hooker saw that the scale and complexity of modern war had made it impossible for any single man to both command an army and control its intelligence operation as well.

  For the latter task he chose Sharpe. At Fredericksburg, he had seen Sharpe decisively sort out a muddle on the field. A regiment of French immigrants had milled about in confusion, unable to understand the order of their non-French-speaking colonel. Sharpe rode over from his own 120th New York (NY) Volunteers, gave the orders in parade ground–loud perfect French, and the regiment moved smartly into line. Hooker had called Sharpe in for an interview and showed him a French book on how to create a secret service. He asked if he could translate it and how fast. Sharpe replied, “As fast as I can read it.” When he did, the job was his.

  Sharpe had taken this new ball and run with it. He created a fully functioning intelligence operation—the Bureau of Military Information (BMI)—practically from scratch. He assembled a contingent of hardy and clever scouts, developed a spy network, and established interrogation, document exploitation, and order-of-battle operations. Hooker had given him carte blanche, which he used to coordinate the other intelligence collection means of the cavalry, Balloon Corps, and Signal Corps. He also established contacts throughout the Eastern Theater of operations that often took him to Washington and Baltimore. His efforts had presented Robert E. Lee “the Incomparable” to Hooker on a silver platter in April, the most magnificent gift of intelligence in the war. However, at Chancellorsville early the next month Joe Hooker had lost faith in Joe Hooker, and all of Sharpe’s efforts went for naught.

  Hooker’s successor, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, had listened to Sharpe at Gettysburg and not flinched. It was Sharpe’s report on the night of July 2 that had convinced Meade to stay and fight it out on the third day of the battle. It was also Sharpe’s special operation raid the morning of the same day that had snatched dispatches to Lee from Jefferson Davis that laid bare the Confederacy’s defensive strategy and force deployment in the East. Stanton was so elated that he poured gold into the hands of Sharpe’s chief of scouts, the sandy-haired Sgt. Milton Cline, who had personally seized the dispatches. Yes, Stanton knew Sharpe.

  Now Sharpe was pondering the reason for his cryptic summons. He considered the possible sources in the reports he had forwarded to Washington. Almost everything had been a running account of Lee’s movements, strength, logistics, and possible intentions. There was nothing really special or earthshaking there, just patient building of a picture of the enemy and the daily effort to keep it current. Although Stanton absorbed everything like a sponge, his interest had shown no special emphasis in the month since Gettysburg except for the case of a contraband named George.

  George, a Confederate officer’s servant, had come through the lines only last week. He bore a strange tale, one that normally was outside Sharpe’s area of responsibility. Cline had come to see him, “Colonel, you should talk to this boy, yourself.” And he did.

  The boy was obviously intelligent. His astute observations confirmed much of what Sharpe’s office already knew, a vital cross-checking feature of intelligence. It was the normal order-of-battle information, but George had more to say when Cline nudged him and said, “George, tell him about the white folks up north.” He then told a tale that made even Sharpe’s eyes widen.

  As Sharpe mused in his carriage, Fox’s and Lamson’s carriage was also moving down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House. Fox chewed on his cigar briefly between sentences. He was too active a man to endure long silences. “These Confederate commerce raiders are gutting our merchant navy, ruining our international commerce, and driving people whose livelihoods have been destroyed into the arms of the people who want this war stopped.”

  Lamson watched the man’s body language radiate hostility. Fox went on, “They’re as serious a threat as the blockade-runners
that keep the rebels alive with the bounty of Her Majesty’s foundries and arsenals.” He looked at the ruin of his cigar with disgust and tossed it out the window. “And, I’ll tell you straight out, Lamson, that we are on the losing end of the fight at both ends. We are just not catching enough blockade-runners, and even when we catch one, Semmes and his infernal Alabama seize two of our ships. A losing game, a losing game.”

  Lamson had not been discouraged by Fox’s venting. Rather his interest had been piqued. It was not every day that a junior naval officer received an invitation to the White House. Within Fox’s lament, Lamson could smell opportunity for something grand. It was with a delicious sense of anticipation that he followed Fox into the White House.

  Charles Dana, the assistant secretary of war and Fox’s counterpart, was already in the anteroom chatting with an Army colonel. He saw Fox and said, “Gus, let me introduce Col. George Sharpe. Colonel, this is Gus Fox whom I’m sure you’ve heard of.”

  Fox sized up Sharpe and was not impressed as they shook hands. “Dana here speaks highly of you, Colonel, don’t you, Charlie?” Sharpe’s handshake was firm, not what Fox expected from such a nondescript-looking man. Then Fox was as taken aback as the lieutenant at the railroad station had been by the transformation of Sharpe’s face. There was power there. He remembered to introduce Lamson, who found some comfort in the presence of another officer in this otherwise intimidating setting of the Executive Mansion, even if it was an Army officer three grades his senior. Fox and Dana drifted off to a corner to talk, leaving the colonel and the lieutenant to their thoughts.