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

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  Twenty-five miles away at Maldon, Lieutenant Colonel Adams had ridden into his own hornet’s nest. It had been a quick ride to this seaport from Southend. They arrived ahead of the news of their coming, not stopping to do any damage along the way. The docks and railway station at Maldon was the objective, and as everywhere else they found the town in sleepy Sunday repose. Adams set his men to work, and the good people of Maldon found themselves shocked wide awake. The docks and warehouses were fired first, then the ships, until flames licked the harbor, sending dirty clouds of black smoke into the spring sky. The railway station and the locomotives and cars were next.

  Adams was standing on the platform, arms on his hips, surveying the destruction with great satisfaction. His orderly next to him flew backward onto the platform just as Adams heard the crack of a rifle. Another bullet splintered the platform at his feet. He dived off the platform into the gravel around the tracks. The sound of Spencers now joined the distinctive crack of the Enfields. His men were returning fire. That’s just what he did not need—a knock-down, drag-out fight. Suddenly a body fell off the platform right on top of him; the corpse wore green. More footsteps and English voices rushed over the platform. Now faces looked over the platform directly at him. A man in green jumped down and raised his bayonet. Adams struggled for his pistol, but his right arm was pinned under the dead man. Another voice, “Stop, man. Take him prisoner.” The bayonet lowered. Then more shots and the man on the platform was hit, falling forward with a groan onto the man standing over Adams. He got up and fled down the tracks.

  The 23rd Essex RVC had not been drilling this Sunday, but when Adams men flaunting the Stars and Stripes had ridden through the streets shouting of the invasion army behind them while setting fire to the town’s livelihood, the men of Maldon had not waited for orders. Hand after hand threw on green coats, slung on ammunition pouches, snatched up Enfields, and flew into the streets looking for trouble. They did not know it, but ghosts were also rushing to arms, but not with rifles. These wraiths wore byrnies of scale mail, and carried swords, axes, and spears. At their head was the Earl of Essex, dead these thousand years. It was here that the men of Essex had flung themselves at Viking invaders, going down in a defeat so glorious that there was not a British boy who had not read the epic poem of their deeds and resolved to live up to their heroism. Of such memories empires are built.

  And defended. Four hundred Maldon volunteers were driving fewer than a hundred thoroughly unhappy Americans through the streets when the railcars in the yard filled with coal oil began to burn with an explosive intensity. Flaming jets of oil arced into the town setting more fires. Adams was lucky that the explosion was absorbed by the dead bodies over him, but he was horrified to see the burning oil flowing through the gravel toward him. He started screaming for help. Again two faces peered over the platform, but these wore dark-blue American army caps. They leapt down, heaved off the corpse, and pulled Adams to his feet. They pulled him along, shielded by the platform and the thickening black smoke. They reached an alley where some of their horses had been left with a horse-holder for each of the four horses. Other men were running into the alley, turning to fire at their pursuers. One man crumpled in the street. Three turned, went to one knee, and sent a stream of fire from their repeaters. Another fell forward to sprawl on the cobbles.

  By this time Adams was mounted, as were barely a dozen others. He pulled his pistol, drove the spurs into his horse, and charged into the street with his men shouting behind him. A man brought up the rear holding the reins of two horses for the men guarding the alley entrance. The RVC skirmishing line stopped, surprised at the sudden charge, just long enough for the Americans to ride pistoling their way through; no one had time to draw saber. The second skirmish line was not so easy. Three saddles were emptied before they reached it. Adams shot his first man in front of him, then another who raised his rifle at him. A third drove his bayonet up through his hand. The pistol flew away as the Englishman wrenched Adams from his saddle like a hooked fish. This time a trooper had drawn his saber, his pistol empty, and charged through killing the Englishman with a downward stroke between neck and shoulder. He reached down his hand for Adams, who had barely regained his feet and kicked his foot out of his facing stirrup. With his unharmed hand Adams grasped the trooper’s hand, put his foot in the stirrup, and heaved himself up behind the saddle. The horse leaped forward under the trooper’s spurs and carried them through a side street that quickly became a country lane. Adams looked back; there were only three men following them. Behind them Maldon burned.5

  ROYAL SMALL ARMS FACTORY ENFIELD, 6:55 P.M., SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 1864

  Wilson played for time. Every minute he spun out the parlay more men of the 41st streamed over the Lea River Bridge to join his band. He also sensed that this young American colonel was playing a bad hand. His men looked too nervous to be the spearhead of anyone’s invasion. Unlike Mr. Mawcaber, something then really turned up for him.

  Palmer’s Essex Yeomanry had had the good fortune to be in a dip in the road bordered by dense trees when the shock wave from exploding powder mills barges swept over them. Palmer had pushed them on to Enfield and arrived by the same road that Dahlgren had used. He could see the flames licking through the factory roof and the clusters of men in the yard. He drew his saber in one clean sweep and heard more rasp from their scabbards behind him. He ordered the charge. Dahlgren’s men barely heard the pounding of hooves before the Yeomanry crashed into them. He had only been able to gather fifty men before he took the road, but fifty men charging into dismounted men from the rear was a thing of terror. Dahlgren turned to see the Yeomanry hacking their way through his mostly dismounted men. They scattered trying to get away from the plunging horsemen. Dahlgren glared at Wilson for violating the truce of the parlay. “Damn you!” he spat and drew his saber. Wilson threw himself backward in the saddle lying almost flat on the horse’s rump as the saber sliced through the air where his head would have been. He righted himself and fired wildly, hitting Dahlgren in the leg. The man did not even wince to Wilson’s surprise. The tide of men and horses swept into them, and Dahlgren found himself racing along trading blows with a Yeomanry trooper. They rode right into the 41st as it charged across the yard. He parried the man’s blade, knocked the next blow aside, and drove the point into his throat, wrenching it free as the man slid to the ground. By then the tide had rushed past him to join the slaughter of his command. Only the Gatling crew had kept together, and it evened the butcher’s bill as the barrels sent a regiment’s firepower into the Enfield Lock men. But only for moments. The Yeomanry fell upon the crew hacking and stabbing, but the gunners died hard emptying saddles with their pistols until the last of them went down.6

  Dahlgren was about to ride back into the chaos to share the fate of his men when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He whipped around in the saddle to strike, but it was Kolya who had found a horse. “You can do no more, Ulrich. They must not capture us. We must fly.” Kolya tore the imperial banner from the staff and wrapped it around him. He led the way down a dark road. Dahlgren followed in a mood as black as the charger he rode, the bile rising to his lips.

  ROYAL HORSEGUARDS BARRACKS, LONDON, 8:22 P.M., SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 1864

  The telegrams had been tumbling in screaming of a massive invasion force rampaging throughout Essex. Romford in flames, Maldon in flames, Burnham on Crouch in flames, Chelmsford in flames, even Colchester attacked. Royal Powder Mills and Royal Small Arms Factory destroyed. American cavalry raiding and destroying everywhere. Large columns of infantry marching inland toward London and Colchester. For Cambridge, the awful realization that the Americans could be in London before reinforcements from the southern garrisons had shaken him. Disraeli had cancelled his address to Parliament at Cambridge’s frantic urging. The emergency was too great to consult Parliament at this time.

  They had agreed that the queen must be rushed to safety. Buckingham Palace was ringed with the Grenadier Guards, bayonets fixed. Outside the p
alace, 1st and 2nd Life Guards waited on horseback, sabers drawn. Inside the palace the queen’s carriages were being packed for her escape to her Channel estate. Panic had rippled through London, and the roads to Surrey and Kent were filling with carriages. The railways had been taken over by the government, and there was no escape by them. Instead they were devoted to bringing troops from Aldershot in Hampshire and Shorncliffe in Kent, five more regiments of foot. All RVCs within marching distance from the surrounding counties were ordered to march to London. The rest of the garrison of London and the city’s RVCs were marching toward Stratford northeast of the edge of the city—Royal Horseguards, 12th Lancers, 1st and 2nd Coldstream Guards, and 1/60th Foot from the Tower—in all only a regular brigade of infantry and one of cavalry and few thousand of the RVCs, a paltry force to stop whole divisions, a dagger poised at the heart of the British Empire. More RVC men were put to work digging entrenchments under supervision of the Royal Engineers. Six companies of Royal Engineers were on their way from their camp at Chatham along with companies from the three depot battalions located there as well. All thought of reinforcing Ireland had evaporated.

  Trying to sort out the mass of wild information flowing over the telegraph was Lt. Col. Charles Freemantle. Cambridge had plucked him out of his staff duties to do just this because no man in the British Army in London had a greater grasp of the Americans at war than Freemantle. In 1863 he had taken three months “shooting leave” to tour the Confederacy where he had been treated with great deference as a Coldstream Guards officer who might be able to influence his government to come to the South’s aid. Shooting leave was the euphemism for an intelligence-gathering mission under the guise of a normal leave of absence.7 He had arrived on the field of Gettysburg in time for the worst of the fighting and had been an eyewitness to Pickett’s charge. Freemantle had told Cambridge right out that he did not believe the Americans could launch a major invasion without some intelligence of it leaking out; however, if by chance they had achieved this miracle, the British would have the fight of their lives on their hands. That had not done the duke’s confidence any good, for he keyed on the later evaluation.

  Freemantle was that rarity in the British Army, not only a skilled line officer but what passed then for a military intellectual. It was the power of objective analysis that he brought to his task. First he separated the reports by those of actual eyewitnesses and those that were unsubstantiated information. A vital pattern revealed itself in that a number of telegrams, including the most current, came from the telegrapher at Brookham. That told him that the Americans had not got that far yet. A non-telegraphic report was the explosion that had cracked windows in London. The direction of that evil cloud and the size of the explosion itself meant that it only could have come from the Royal Powder Mills at Waltham Abbey, which then led to the logical conclusion that a force of Americans of undetermined size had got as far as the western border of Essex. The close proximity of the Royal Small Arms Factory Enfield led then to the next logical conclusion that it too could be a target directed against the war-making power of Britain as much as the powder mills had been.

  That analysis was confirmed with his close questioning of a few men who had arrived in person from Romford to describe the seizure of the town by a railway-riding force that unloaded horses, part of which had ridden north. North was the direction of the powder mills and the factory. Their estimate of the size of the force conflicted from five hundred to a thousand. None of these men had any military experience to properly judge the size of the force and admitted that they had not seen the entire force. So Freemantle concluded that a good deal of exaggeration was involved. The force was certainly not a thousand and probably less than five hundred. Next he ascertained that the Americans had arrived on the London, Tilbury, Southend line on a northbound train. Following the line south led to its terminus at Southend-on-Sea. “Exactly,” he thought to himself. Whatever force had landed had come from ships unloading on the great pier. There were no other ports on that line. He immediately went in person to the Admiralty to report his findings.

  On his return, he found a telegram that had just arrived from Brookham from the commander of the 3rd Essex RVC. It contained a clear account of the fighting in the town, definitely confirming that they were fighting American cavalry, not infantry, and that the 15th Essex from Hornchurch had already been in action. He estimated the size of the American force at a few hundred and that they were surrounded in the rail yard. Freemantle allowed himself the satisfaction of analysis confirmed. But as usual, though, that piece of the puzzle just posed more questions.

  What of the rest of the reports? How did he know which were true and which were not? And how did the pieces fit into the piece he already had? Thousands of lives and the fate of great London depended on the answers to these questions.

  At that moment Disraeli was desperately trying to persuade the queen to depart for the safety of her Channel estate. He had rushed over to Buckingham Palace when she sent word that she had changed her mind and was not leaving London. Victoria sat on her settee as calmly as in any normal visit by the prime minister.

  Disraeli was quite clear in his mind what the political value was of his close relationship with the queen. That did not exclude his genuine devotion to Victoria as his sovereign and admiration for her as an accomplished women. When he had come to power that relationship had been discussed in his cabinet. He had argued that the queen was both able and knowledgeable to a remarkable degree on what was going on in her Kingdom and had been trained by Prince Albert and some of the most accomplished men in politics over the last twenty-five years. To the snide comment that “she was, after all, only a women,” Disraeli had retorted, “Yes, to all her other accomplishments she adds feeling and intuition.”

  Now that formidable woman was telling him she would not leave the capital. Disraeli said, “Mum, the government must insist on your safety, which cannot be guaranteed in London at this time.”

  “Mr. Disraeli, would Elizabeth had left London even had Parma set foot on this island with his entire army?”

  “Your Majesty, under those circumstances, I have no doubt that the loyal gentlemen around her would have carried her to safety regardless of her command.”

  “We are not amused, Prime Minister.”

  “It is not my intention to amuse or offend, Mum,” Disraeli added in order to find an argument that would budge her, “but to point out that your security in London requires at least three battalions of the Guards, trained men vitally needed for the defense of the city.”

  “We understand the city’s rifle volunteer corps have been called up and those of the surrounding counties are on their way as we speak. Take our Guards. Prime Minister, there will be Englishmen enough to guard us.” In end, Disraeli did not carry Victoria away, but he took the two battalions of the Life Guards cavalry. They made a splendid sight clattering away on their big horses, their nickeled breast and back armor and Greek revival helmets nodding with the trot. Her last battalion of the Grenadier Guards she kept, the oldest regiment of the British Army and the one with the closest association with the protection of the monarch. She would have mortified them had she entrusted amateurs entirely in their place.8

  SOUTHEND-ON-SEA, 8:35 P.M., SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 1864

  Lamson paced his quarterdeck. Dahlgren was late. He had missed the rendezvous time an hour ago. Adams was late too, but two hundred of his men had filed back into Southend over the last hour. Before the sun had gone down, he had seen the smoke rising from the Essex countryside off into the distance. Then he had ridden into town to confer with the Marine major commanding the occupation of the town. Men were still trickling in. He gave the major firm order to abandon the town at 9:00 P.M. no matter what. Dahlgren knew what being late meant. Every minute he waited, he expected to see the Royal Navy in force descending on him. The fact that he had not been blown out of the water by now he could thank Meagher for. Several powerful British ships had steamed out of the Thames right pa
st the pier. They had been dispatched to the Irish Sea, as had most of the ships in the Navy’s channel bases before any news of Essex.

  Now the Royal Navy would suffer from the dilemma articulated by the Prussian Chief of the General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, “Order, counterorder, disorder.”9 Most of those ships rushing at top speed to the Irish Sea would have to be recalled to defend Mother England itself. That would take time, first to find the ships fast enough to catch up with them, and then the time to reverse course and steam back the way they had come to converge on the Essex coast. It was through this window of disorder that Lamson would have to escape, though he did not know what was happening, he could surmise the reason. Meagher must have raised holy hell in Ireland. He could also surmise that as soon as Dahlgren’s raid entered the British brain, the tide would change bringing the Royal Navy howling after him.

  One ship had a head start on all the rest and was beyond recall. HMS Prince Albert had put to sea again after its refit and before the news of Ireland. It had entered the Irish Sea as night fell and by midnight was cruising off the coast of southern Wales when the watch identified a half-dozen fires at sea. Coles immediately ordered, “Beat to Quarters.” Only dying ships could illuminate the sea that way.

  As Prince Albert strained her engines to reach the burning ships, those of HIMS Aleksandr Nevsky were taking her away from them. After raiding the ships waiting for the afternoon tide off the Mersey mouth to Liverpool, he had dispersed his squadron to more easily pick off individual ships in the Irish Sea, retaining only a corvette. The squadron would rendezvous off the south coast of Ireland.10

  EPPING FOREST, 2:02 A.M., MONDAY, APRIL 4, 1864

  They were five now. After escaping the carnage at Enfield, Dahlgren and Kolya had disappeared into the dusk down a country road when they heard horses behind them at a gallop. They pulled up into the shadow of the trees as the Russian sailor Feodor, and an American soldier with a prisoner came barreling by. Feodor had survived Palmer’s charge and seen his officer escape with the colors; his place was with him. He had leapt onto a Yeoman, pulled him off the horse with brute strength, mounted himself, and followed Dahlgren and Rimsky-Korsakov. He soon found an American riding with him, pistol in hand, driving a frightened civilian on another horse.