Bayonets, Balloons & Ironclads: Britain and France Take Sides With the South

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  Weitzel, Godfrey. Maj. Gen., U.S. Volunteers; commander, XVIII Corps, Army of the James.

  Welles, Gideon. War Democrat and flinty U.S. Secretary of the Navy.

  Wells, William. Colonel, U.S. Volunteers; commander, 1st Vermont Cavalry, 3rd Brigade, Cavalry Division, Army of the Hudson.

  Wetherall, E.R. Colonel, British Army, and commander, Guards Brigade, British Imperial forces in British North America.

  Whitman, Walt. Nurse to wounded Union soldiers, poet, and sometime clerk for the United States Government in Washington, D.C.

  *Wilkes, Ashely. Major, C.S. Army, Cobb’s Legion (9th Georgia Cavalry Regiment), Wade Hampton’s Cavalry Division, Cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia.

  *Wilmoth, Michael D. Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Volunteers; Director of Analysis (DA), Central Information Bureau (CIB), and protégé of George H. Sharpe.

  Wilson, James H. Brigadier General, U.S. Volunteers; and commander, 3rd Cavalry Division, Cavalry Corps, Army of the Potomac.

  Wilson, Sir Robert, VC. Retired captain of the 9th Lancers living in Waltham Abby.

  Wolseley, Garnet J. Brigadier General, British Army, Imperial forces in British North America.

  Wright, Horatio G. Major General, U.S. Volunteers; commander, VI Corps, Army of the Rappahannock.

  Wright, Michael. Sergeant Major and aide to Maj. Gen. Thomas Francis Meagher.

  Zeppelin, Count Ferdinand von. Captain, Prussian Army, official observer of the American Civil War.

  Zipperer, Christian Edward 2nd Lieutenant, 7th Georgia Cavalry Regiment, Cavalry Corps, Army of Northern Virginia.

  1

  “I’ve Been Turned into a Complete American Now”

  HAMPTON ROADS, 11:23 A.M., MONDAY, MARCH 14, 1864

  The Captain of USS Catskill1 in his little armored pilot house atop the ship’s great turret screamed through the speaking tube, “Hard to larboard, hard to larboard!” He could not take his eyes off the British ship steaming straight for him amidships. It had come out of the smoke, its engines straining to churn its paddlewheels at maximum speed of twelve knots. The monitor could manage at most six knots, but it could barely begin to move by the time HMS Buzzard2 smashed into it. The British sloop screamed as its copper bottom rode up over the Catskill’s low freeboard deck forward of the turret. The monitor’s bow dipped below water as the weight of the sloop pulled the ironclad down by its starboard side. Inside men were thrown against machinery or bulkheads. The turret spun uncontrollably down to starboard on its great spindle.

  Maj. George Bazalgette, VC, Royal Marines Light Infantry (RMLI), was the first to leap over the Buzzard‘s rail and onto the deck of the monitor now three inches underwater. Twenty Royal Marines and a dozen armed tars followed. One team ran to the turret. They would have thrown grenades through the gun apertures, but they were pointing directly down toward the water. Another group found a deck hatch that led to the interior of the ship. They were about to blow it with a special explosive charge, but it flew open of its own as a man threw himself up the ladder. He was pulled out by the first Marine, as were three more who tried to escape the same way. Then the Marines plunged down the ladder and into the bowels of the ship.

  Bazalgette climbed a metal ladder to the top of the turret. The hatch to the armored pilot house clanged open, and an American naval officer stumbled out and right up against Bazalgette’s sword. “Strike, damn you, strike!” The captain looked to the bow. His eyes widened at the sight of Buzzard‘s bow pointing into the air as it rested on his deck and his crew climbing out of the hatch their hands in the air. He glanced to the stern to see a British sailor haul down the Stars and Stripes. He pulled himself together. “It seems, sir, my ship is already yours.”

  HAMPTON ROADS, 10:20 A.M., MONDAY, MARCH 14, 1864

  An hour before Bazalgette leapt over the side, the admiral commanding the British flotilla in Hampton Roads murmured quietly to himself, “Yes.” It was not an emphatic, triumphant yes, for that level of emotion simply wouldn’t do. It was just a calm statement of fact. The American ironclads were steaming out of Norfolk Navy Yard.3 They had taken the bait. And it was very attractive bait. More than forty Royal Navy vessels were crowding Hampton Roads to attack Fortress Monroe, the key to the entire Chesapeake.

  The Chesapeake was the largest estuary in the United States, surrounded by Maryland and Virginia and constituted the drainage of the District of Columbia and six states from more than 150 rivers and streams. It ran two hundred miles from the Susquehanna River in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the south.4 Just south of the Potomac it reached its widest point at thirty miles. Its average depth was forty-six feet and deepest at 208 feet, though sandbars and shallows made for narrow channels. Directly west of its entrance to the Atlantic was the James Peninsula through which Maj. Gen. George McClellan had two years ago attempted to steal a march on Richmond. The peninsula was bound on the north by the York River and the south by the James, which led to Richmond. The entrance to the James was the wide stretch of water known as Hampton Roads, and across this body was the Norfolk Navy Yard to which the North and South Atlantic Blockading Squadrons had withdrawn after the Third Battle of Charleston.5 At the head of the Peninsula was Fortress Monroe. That fortification and the U.S. Navy forces at Norfolk effectively closed Richmond itself from communication by sea and made it difficult for ships to proceed up the Potomac and further up the bay to Baltimore. It was the key to the Chesapeake.

  The British warships were wreathed in smoke as they pounded away at the fort, but the greatest firepower came from the ships and craft of “The Great Armament,” a collection of cast-iron armored floating batteries that had been built in the Crimean War specifically to smash the defenses of Russia’s capital of St. Petersburg, the great Russian naval base at Kronstadt. The Great Armament was paraded for the Queen after that war ended in a dramatic exercise at Spithead, an obvious warning not only to St. Petersburg but to Paris and Washington too. Supporting the batteries of the Great Armament were almost thirty gunboats, small ships armed with one to six guns and designed to attack coastal targets and operate in shallow and confining estuaries.6

  Absent from the operations in the bay were British ships-of-the-line, the battleships of yore. Their easy destruction at Charleston with such terrible loss of life had caused the British to keep them out of possible engagements with monitors. Their armament largely of old 68-pounder guns had proven utterly inadequate. A few were used in the blockade. Instead, a strong force of frigates and corvettes armed with more powerful 8- and 10-inch guns were assembled as the backbone of the British presence in the bay.

  After the Royal Navy’s humiliating defeat the previous November at Charleston, it had concentrated its efforts to make sure the Americans would be eternally sorry for ever having started this war.7 Nothing sparked the adamantine resolve of the island race than a sound defeat. But the Royal Navy was presented with an immense strategic problem, the prospect of having to blockade the wild Atlantic coast of the Northern states. The blockade of France in her earlier wars was child’s play compared to this. Then the Royal Navy had its own bases, right across the Channel. In this war, its only bases were Halifax and Bermuda, far too distant to support the distant blockade. Of course, Confederate ports were useful but only to a small degree. The U.S. Navy when it was blockading the Confederacy’s southern Atlantic Ports needed forward operating bases on that coast itself. To whittle the problem down, Milne seized Martha’s Vineyard in late November. Just off the coast of Massachusetts, it would serve to support the ships stopping up Boston and the other major New England ports.

  The Royal Navy was supporting its operations in the Chesapeake from its forward operating base at Wilmington, North Carolina, eagerly provided by the Confederates who were desperate to earn an open alliance with the British. The blockade of such a long coast put a premium on the use of the smaller sloops and the gunboats that could dart in and attack American coastal targets. Unfortunately, the British had transferred most of these gunboa
ts and many of the sloops from West Africa where they had been used to suppress the slave trade. Their absence led to a spike in the slaving for the Brazilian and Confederate markets, the latter having been restarted since the 1808 abolition on the importation of slaves in the Constitution was now a dead letter.8 For a nation that so detested slavery, Britain blithely had stripped its naval forces from suppressing the slave trade to fighting as an ally of a slave state. The irony was not lost on the growing opposition to the war led by John Bright in the House of Commons.9

  With the fall of Fortress Monroe and the Norfolk Navy Yard, the Royal Navy would have a perfect forwarding operating bases from which to cover the Middle Atlantic States. The Royal Navy’s analysis for the British 1861 war plan against the United States concluded that most of the major American ports such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York were not vulnerable to an attack by sea because they were located up great fort-guarded rivers rather than being coastal cities. Milne’s near success when a flotilla of his smaller ships had slipped up the Potomac to come within an eyelash of taking Washington in conjunction with an attack by Lee’s army last November raised doubt in that conclusion. That near success, however, had only been possible because of the cooperation of the Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The Royal Navy would not have such assistance in attacks against those major northern cities so that was option was never seriously considered.

  BAY OF BENGAL, 9:12 A.M., MONDAY, MARCH 14, 1864

  She was a fat merchantman thirty-six hours out of Calcutta, heavy with a load of cotton for England’s hungry mills. Her lookout spotted a plume of smoke over the horizon, and then another. In another four hours a sleek screw ship bore down on them from the direction of the smoke. She flew the Royal Navy ensign, her guns were run out, and she signaled for the merchantman to stop and prepare for inspection.

  Her captain ordered immediate compliance, and as soon as her engines came to full stop, the Royal Navy ensign came fluttering and the Stars and Stripes flew up in its place. It was a stunned captain who watched as American Marines boarded his ship followed by a naval officer.

  The captain’s presence returned in a rush. “What is this outrage, sir? You have no right to board this ship under such threat.”

  A bemused smile crossed the American’s face. “I am Lieutenant Wilson of the USS Wyoming, sir. I presume you are the ship’s master? If so, you will provide me with your papers and cargo manifest—immediately.”10

  The captain continued to bluster and complain all the way to his cabin. Finally, the American had had enough. “Are you unaware, Captain, that our two countries are at war? And, therefore, your ship is a lawful prize of war? Now be so good as to provide those documents.”

  The American took a few minutes to review them. “It is your misfortune, Captain, to master a British ship carrying a cargo consigned to British merchants. If your cargo had been the property of a neutral, it might have saved your ship. Gather your personal belongings and order your crew to do the same.”

  Now aboard the Wyoming, the British captain cried out in grief and rage as the fires began to lick up the rigging of his ship and then gushed out of the holds. The cotton would make a bonfire visible for miles before she went under.

  SHIRAKAVAN, ARMENIA, 8:10 P.M., TUESDAY, MARCH 15, 1864

  General Nikolai Nikolayevich Muravyov-Karsky felt the cold in his bones as he sat on his horse on a small hill overlooking the Russian-Ottoman border. Below him the Cossack raiding party galloped into the night.

  Their objective was a nameless Armenian village in the Ottoman province of Kars a dozen versts from where Muravyov-Karsky waited. They found it asleep and shabby, and their stay did not improve it. The Armenians, as fellow Christians, they merely robbed, moderately. The Turks, they killed. All but one. He was thrown at the feet of the Cossack commander’s horse. Three men kicked him to his feet. Blood poured from his torn scalp down his long white robe. It was all he could do to keep his feet. The screams of his raped women penetrated even the fog of his pain. Hatred of the Turk burned deep in the Cossacks, the descendants of runaway serfs who had formed a warrior society to guard the Russian marches against the constant raids that fed Islam’s insatiable desire for slaves. Until the reign of Catherine the Great those raids had been so destructive as to negate the vigorous increase of the Russians. So many Russians had filled the rowing benches of the Sultan’s galleys, that the Turks had joked that there must be no men left in Russia. Now the whip was in the other hand.

  The Armenian interpreter puffed himself up as the Cossack commander gestured toward the Turk with his whip. He said, “Your Honor, this is the local Turkish landowner.”

  The Cossack looked down on him. Behind him the Turk’s house was beginning to burn, its light glinting off the silver accoutrement’s of the officer’s long coat. “Dog, we have spared you to carry a message to your masters. We know the way to Kars very well. Muravyov-Karsky commands again.”

  A few hours later the officer was reporting to Muravyov-Karsky, who nodded. The general was an old man at sixty-nine, full of battle honors and memories. He had seen war first against Napoleon, chased Polish rebels, and hammered the Turks again and again. For his last great feat the nation had acclaimed him “Karsky” for having taken the great Turkish fortress of Kars after an epic siege in 1855. His acclamation was more thunderous for it was Russia’s only victory in the Crimean War.

  Muravyov-Karsky had been asked by the tsar himself to go back to his old command in the Caucasus to ostentatiously give the Turks cause to fear again for their great fortress that secured Ottoman Armenia. The eyes of the Sublime Porte must be drawn to the east and fixed there. And what could do that better than the reputation of the man who had taken the fortress once before. That and Cossack frightfulness, but then it was in the language the Turks understood.

  As the old general guided his horse back to his headquarters and its warm bed, his thoughts went back to the siege. He had given the Turks the honors of war, for they had fought hard and valiantly even as they starved, but had it not been for the Englishman who commanded them, the gallant William Fenwick Williams, he would have made short work of them. Then again his opponent’s skill and valor had only added to his own glory when the fortress finally capitulated. He had also had the honor to escort the captured Englishman to St. Petersburg and personally present him to Tsar Alexander II.

  He had heard that Fenwick Williams had been made commander in British North America as a reward for his defense of Kars. Canada—an exotic place, he thought. He wondered how his old enemy was doing now that Canada was the cockpit of this new war between the British and the Americans.

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, DC, 7:30 P.M., MONDAY, MARCH 14, 1864

  Pryce Lewis was nervous to meet the President. He was born a Welshman but called himself English, by which he meant a Briton. He was a spy. Not as one might think, a British spy. He had spent nineteenth months in the infamous Confederate prison, Castle Thunder, in Richmond for spying for the Union as one of Alan Pinkerton’s agents. He had seen a companion hanged, but only the hand of Providence had saved him from that same noose. He found himself recounting to Lincoln how he had been taken from his cell in early September of last year to the exchange boat on the James River.

  “There it was, hanging limply from the flag-of-truce boat, Mr. President. The American flag. I turned to my friend, Scully, and I said, ‘If before this I had any English feeling left, I’ve been turned into a complete American now.’”11 He looked up at Sharpe who had hired him for the CIB after his return to Washington.

  There were several million Britons living in the United States, mostly in the North, part of the great wave of immigration that had brought the Germans and Irish, as well as Scandinavians, Dutch, and French, to find a new life. But the ties of blood and affection were the most durable of all. Yet, they had come to make a new life, and most had found it, grew roots, and bore children in the new land. For many the war brought as indescribable a grief as Americ
ans north and south had felt when the Republic sundered across the affections of countless families. For many, the choice was clear. They had come to America to escape a hopeless future that soured them on the land of their birth. Such was Andrew Carnegie, who despised the British class system, hierarchies of church and society, and above all, the Royals. Now his genius was multiplying the strength of American industry.

  Lewis recalled to Lincoln the story of another Briton, John Richardson, who had taken part in the Charge of the Light Brigade, where he had charged past the Russian guns and received two wounds from Cossack lances. Richardson had written, “I was in Hulme Barracks. I was absent for six days, and the adjutant (John Yates) called me a scamp when I returned. I replied, ‘I am not like you—a coward. I saw you run from a mounted Cossack; and further you never went down in the charge.’ After this I was up to my neck in trouble and eventually I was tried and got fifty lashes and ordered to be imprisoned. My bad back took ways and festered and I was in hospital for twenty-eight days. During that time a letter was sent out of the hospital to an editor, was published, describing how they flogged me in the riding school, like a dog. The Colonel employed lawyers and endeavored to get the writer’s name, but the editor would not give way. My father being an educated man, wrote to the Duke of Cambridge, and he ordered me to be liberated and discharged at once. I sailed for America and enlisted in the New Jersey Volunteers, and fought in the Battle of Pittsburg.”12 He had also said that the future for a worn-out soldier was only the workhouse. Here he had a future.

  There were many more native-born Britons in Union Blue, and many had fought at Portland, Kennebunk, and Clavarack. How it must have caught in their throats to see across the field the lines of red coats and above them Union flag of the United Kingdom, the superimposed flags of England and Scotland, the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew, and to hear the skirl of bagpipes. For most, in the end, it was the ties to the land of their children rather than that of their fathers that mattered. Still, for many the choice had been an agony.