A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril an Alternate History
Page 1
ALSO BY PETER G. TSOURAS
Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War - An Alternate History
Alexander: Invincible King of Macedonia
Montezuma: Warlord of the Aztecs
PETER G. TSOURAS
THE BRITANNIA'S FIST TRILOGY
VOLUME 2
This book is respectfully dedicated to all the men of the Bureau of Military Intelligence of the Army of the Potomac-the first practitioners of all-source intelligence, the unsung combat multiplier in the great war for the survival of the Union.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
Maps xvii
Dramatis Personae xix
CHAPTERS
1. Hanging Billy 1
2. Le Bat 27
3. Niter and a One-Eyed Lake 49
4. "Well, They Might Have Stayed to See the Shooting" 73
5. Honey, Vinegar, and Guncotton 89
6. "Because I Can't Fly!" 107
7. Lee Is Coming 131
8. Fateful Night 155
9. Perilous Morning 173
1 0. "Prettiest Parade I've Ever Seen" 195
1 1. Click, Bang! 217
12. The Serpent's Eye 255
Appendix A. Order of Battle at Vermillionville 273
Appendix B: Order of Battle at Kennebunk 279
Appendix C: Order of Battle at Clavarack 283
Notes 291
About the Author 311
I have been fortunate indeed to have as a longstanding friend and colleague the soundest of sounding boards, William F. Johnson. Over endless cups of coffee, I have sought his advice and bounced my ideas off his encyclopedic knowledge of this period of military history in the development of the details and story line of A Rainbow of Blood. As Edward Gibbons's service in the British militia prompted him to say that he thought the Hampshire Grenadiers informed the historian, Bill's service in the U.S. Marine Corps and as an intelligence officer have combined with great good judgment to make him a both a formidable critic and an astute observer. I am indebted to his help.
British troops swarmed through the buildings of the Washington Arsenal only to find the powder magazines empty. The Arsenal workers had removed them before they fled-all except for what they had hidden down a well. It was into the darkness of that well that a British soldier peered, torch in hand. He tossed it down to see what was at the bottom. A tremendous explosion rocked the site "whereby the officers and about thirty of the men were killed and the rest most shockingly mangled."1
The scene was not the beginning of the Great War in September 1863; it took place in 1814 during the second Anglo-American War when the British sacked and burned Washington. Yet the feckless action of a lone British soldier who touched off a disaster would be paralleled by the rulers of his nation as the American Civil War raged forty-nine years later.
The British establishment maintained such an active dislike for the American experiment that it looked across the Atlantic with undisguised glee at the young republic's fratricide. Great Britain's neutrality law was so loosely written and even more loosely observed that it was no hindrance to the massive trade with the Confederacy that equipped and outfitted its armies with the vast output of British industry. Even worse was the building of commerce raiders in British yards that devastated the American merchant marine. Only the greatest pressure from the U.S. government would force the British government to interfere with the practice, but even then British juries invariably ruled for the Confederates.
The last straw was when the Laird Brothers firm in Birkenhead began building for the Confederacy two armored iron warships outfitted with steel rams. Abraham Lincoln was finally forced to put aside his policy of "one war at a time" and deliver an ultimatum on September 5, 1863, threatening war if the ships were delivered. At the same time in Britannia's Fist's alternate history, the USS Gettysburg was dispatched to sink the Laird rams if they escaped.
Events now rested on the jagged edge of war and peace. As the British soldier in 1814 had done, Lord John Russell, the British foreign minister, peered down the dark well, torch in hand. He dismissed every fact-filled brief submitted by Charles Francis Adams, the U.S. ambassador, even as he concluded that the ships must be seized as a matter not of law but of state policy. He notified Adams of this too late. A Confederate sympathizer in Lord Russell's own office was the one to actually knock the torch out of his temporizing hand and down the well. He warned the builder, and the just-completed CSS North Carolina fled on the morning tide. Things now automatically began to happen.
Gettysburg caught North Carolina off the coast of Wales and seized her in British waters. HMS Liverpool arrived to dispute the action. Defiances were thrown and the Battle of Moelfre Bay began. The British frigate would have overpowered the smaller American ship had not USS Kearsarge arrived to tip the scales. Liverpool died in the explosion that blew her powder magazines, taking six hundred British lives. An enraged Britain declared war.
Kearsarge fled home, pursued by a vengeful British squadron with orders to take or sink her wherever found. They followed her right through the Verrazano Narrows and into the Upper Bay of New York, despite her escort by a Russian naval squadron that had intercepted her. The battle was desperate, but the British were driven out. As the battle raged, the British ambassador delivered the declaration of war.
The British struck first. Too weak to defend British North America, British troops and Canadian militia struck simultaneously to seize Portland, Maine, and Albany, New York, by coup de main. Maine was vital to the survival of British North America. The only railroad that connected Canada with Britain ran from Halifax, Nova Scotia, down to Portland and then north to Quebec and beyond. Maine's regiments from the Army of the Potomac were just detraining in Portland for recruiting duty as the British attacked. Led by Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, they saved the city, but the British patiently set siege.
The objective of Albany had a different, though no less strategic, purpose. New York was the richest, most populous, and most industrialized state in the Union; it was vital to the American ability to wage war. From Albany the British struck down the Hudson Valley, leaving a pall of smoke in their wake as they burned the river towns and terrified New York City, America's great entrepot. Already its population's morale had been shaken by the draft riots of July when the mostly Irish mobs had run rampant. Crack the morale of New York, and the United States would be out of the war.
At the same time, the Copperheads, the violently anti-war, Lincolnhating Democrats of the Midwest, rose in their planned revolt to take their states out of the Union and into the Confederacy with the aid of Confederate prisoners liberated from the POW camps in Indianapolis, Chicago, and Rock Island. Chicago, the nation's second city, fell to this stab in the back. At the same time, the Royal Navy was preparing to descend on the coasts of North America to break the blockade of the South and counterhlockade the North.
It was at this moment that the Union could have cracked as the storms of foreign war and rebellion crashed and broke. But it held. It was now total war. The Union could no longer fight with one hand tied behind its back. Every resource would be strained to its utmost, for it faced the greatest power of the era whose industrial capacity, with an equal population, was ten times as large. To these odds were added the second industrial power of Europe, as the French jackal, Napoleon III, sought to guarantee his conquest of Mexico by also declaring war.
By the summer of 1863, Lincoln had already done much to prepare the Union for this ultimate struggle. He had been impressed by the brilliant and decisive contribution to the vict
ory at Gettysburg by the Bureau of Information (BMI), the first all-source intelligence organization in history. He brought its creator, Col. George H. Sharpe, to Washington in late July to replicate on the national and international stage what he had done for the Army of the Potomac-rationalize the disparate and uncoordinated efforts of the government. In short order, Sharpe created the Central Information Bureau (CIB) and established its motto: "We Share Intelligence." He utterly rejected the natural instinct to horde information as power. He would make the CIB a great combat multiplier for the Union.
Lincoln had also taken action to create another combat multiplier by removing the chief of the Army's Ordnance Bureau, Brig. Gen. James Ripley, who had obstructed every attempt to take advantage of emerging technologies such as repeating and hreechloading firearms. Lincoln was a technologically astute and transformational man, but his efforts had been effectively blocked by Ripley, who would sabotage a direct presidential order to buy repeating weapons. Even Lincoln's direct purchase of the first effective machine gun, which he named "the coffee mill gun," had been countered by Ripley, who saw that every one was returned to be safely polished and stored in the Washington Arsenal.
Lincoln's nose for technological innovation had also been shown in his order to establish the Army Balloon Corps early in the Civil War. With a telegrapher in each balloon, Union commanders were able to receive real-time aerial intelligence. So effective were the balloons that they terrified the Confederates, but Lincoln could not be everywhere all the time. The war structure of the federal government and the armed forces was too new and unwieldy. With no one to watch over it, the Balloon Corps was neglected to death by the Army. Lincoln's first order to Sharpe was to get his balloons back. Sharpe did just that and was careful to subordinate the revitalized Balloon Corps to the CIB.
The survival of Portland was owed to Sharpe's suggestion that the Maine regiments be returned under the cover of recruiting. His suggestion was based on intelligence that intensive prewar British intelligence was gathering in Maine. After his arrival in Washington, Sharpe had met a British visitor over dinner, the one-eyed Lt. Col. Garnet Wolseley, the assistant quartermaster general of British North America. They both realized the other was more than represented. Sharpe was no ordinary colonel of infantry; Wolseley had soldier written all over him despite his mufti. Both recognized a formidable opponent in each other. For Wolseley would return to plan the attack on the United States and fill the intelligence role that Sharpe did across the border.
But intelligence, balloons, and repeaters, not to mention the nation's deeper resources of industry and ingenuity, were advantages that would be slow to develop. Smoke hung over the Hudson Valley as New York City screamed for help. Two army corps (XI and XII) of the Army of the Potomac had been ordered to the relief of the trapped Union Army of the Cumberland at Chattanooga, Tennessee, following its defeat at Chickam auga. They were instead diverted to New York City and designated the Army of the Hudson. Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker was given command; it was a supreme opportunity to redeem himself after his defeat at Chancellorsville in May.
History was coming to his aid at that moment. The tramp of redcoats on the soil of their adopted land had switched the huge Irish immigrant community from its Democrat-inspired opposition to the war to its total support. In the days after the Battle of the Upper Bay, the former commander of the Irish Brigade, Brig. Gen. Thomas Francis Meagher, had recruited fifteen thousand of his countrymen to fight for the Union, the equivalent of an army corps. Lincoln had promptly promoted him and given him command of XI Corps at Hooker's suggestion. His first act was to lead a band of his Irish veterans to scotch the British raid on the Cold Spring Foundry across the Hudson from the Military Academy at West Point. The foundry was the largest producer of cannon for the Army and a strategic asset. His men returned to a victory parade in New York where flowers cascaded on their ranks; a red coat swung from each bayonet. But the British Albany Field Force had only been nicked. Its wait for New York City to panic would not be long, and it marched downriver to settle things once and for all as a huge reinforcement from the British Isles put to sea.
As the British poised to march on New York City, the ships of the Royal Navy's heavily reinforced North American and West Indian Station left their anchorage in Bermuda. Vice Adm. Sir Alexander Milne sent a strong force to break the blockade at Charleston while he led his main force to the Chesapeake Bay. It was at Charleston that the navies would fight one of the great battles of the war. Led by two of the largest armored broadside warships of the day, the British crossed the bar to get at the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron that was commanded by the father of U.S. naval ordnance, Rear Adm. John Dahlgren.
At the Third Battle of Charleston, it would be American technology that was decisive. Dahlgren's famous guns packed a bigger punch than anything the Royal Navy had, and his battle line of Passaic class monitors and the broadside New Ironsides outfought the two British armored leviathans in the first great battle of armored warships. Yet as glorious as the triumph of that day was, it was a strategic disaster. The blockade was as broken as if every one of Dahlgren's ships had gone to the bottom. The loss of the forward operating pass at Port Royal made the blockade logistically unsupportable. Charleston station was abandoned as Dahlgren's force fled north to the shelter of Norfolk Navy Yard and the Chesapeake, picking up the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron at Wilmington on its retreat. Britannia still ruled the waves with her huge navy as it began to choke off American trade and hover like sentinels of ill omen off every port. The Royal Navy, smarting over its defeat, would resort to its ultimate weapon, the slow squeeze of blockade that had brought the haughty monarchs of Spain and France to heel time and time again.
Thus the alternate history of Britannia's Fist ended with the Union in dire peril -the blockade broken, Maine lost, Portland besieged, the Midwest in revolt, Albany seized, and New York City threatened. Throughout the Confederacy, the church hells, if they had not already been melted to make cannon, were ringing in delirious joy. The fervent hope of foreign intervention had been fulfilled with the resounding glory of an Old Testament prophecy.
If anyone thought that victory had fallen into the lap of the Confederacy, though, it was not Robert E. Lee. Hard fighting still lay ahead. He knew the men in blue had a core of resilient steel, but for the first time, the odds were now more than even.
This now is the story of A Rainbow of Blood.
The Franco-Confederate Gulf Campaign, October-November 1863 32
The Battle of Vermillionville, October 22,1863 75
The Portland Sortie, October 24, 1863 110
The Battle of Kennehunk, October 25,1863 127
Washington, D.C., October 1863 136
The Anglo-Confederate Attack on Washington, October 27-28, 1863 181
The Battle of Claverack, October 28, 1863, Phase 1 205
The Fight for the Navy Yard, October 28, 1863 219
The Struggle for the Long Bridge, October 28, 1863 223
The Battle of Claverack, October 1863, Phase 2 228
Alfred Ernest Albert, His Royal Highness. Lieutenant, Royal Navy (RN), aboard HMS Racoon, the nineteen-year-old second son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Alger, Russell A. Colonel, U.S. Volunteers; commander, 5th Michigan Cavalry, 2nd Brigade, Cavalry Division, Army of the Hudson, in the Hudson Valley Campaign.
Andrews, George A. Brigadier general, U.S. Volunteers; commander of the garrison of Port Hudson.
Babcock, John C. Civilian order-of-battle analyst and assistant director, Bureau of Military Information (BMI), Headquarters, Army of the Potomac.
Baker, Lafayette. Director of the Secret Service of the War Department.
Banks, Nathaniel. Major general, U.S. Volunteers; commander, District of the Gulf.
Barton, Clara. Volunteer nurse with the Union Army in the defenses of Washington.
Bazaine, Francois Achille. General, French Imperial Army; commander, French Forces in Mexico and of the Texas
Expedition in support of the Confederacy.
Beauregard, Pierre Gustave Toutant de. General, C.S. Army; commander of the coastal defenses of South Carolina and Georgia.
Berdan, Hiram. Colonel, U.S. Volunteers; commander, Rifle Regiment.
Booth, John Wilkes. Fiery dramatic actor, brother of Edwin Booth, and a rabid Southern sympathizer.
Bragg, Braxton. General, C.S. Army; commander, Army of Tennessee.
Bright, John. Member of Parliament, one of the great reformers of the age, and advocate of the Union, derisively referred to as "the member for America."
Callaway, James E. Major, U.S. Volunteers, 21st Illinois Volunteer Infantry, assigned to the Army of the Cumberland.
Candy, Charles. Colonel, U.S. Volunteers; commander, lst Brigade, 2nd Division, XII Corps.
Carnegie, Andrew. Railroad executive, entrepreneur, and organizer of the first train to rush troops to the defense of Washington at the outbreak of the Civil War.
Chamberlain, Joshua Lawrence. Colonel, U.S. Volunteers; commander, 1st Brigade, First Battle of Portland.
Clarke, Asia Booth. Sister of John Wilkes Booth and Edwin Booth.
Cline, Milton. Major, U.S. Volunteers, 3rd Indiana Cavalry, and senior scout of the Central Information Bureau (CIB).
Cobham, George A., Jr. Colonel, U.S. Volunteers; commander, 2nd Brigade, 2nd Division, XII Corps, Army of the Hudson.
Coles, Cowper Phipps. Captain, RN; innovator and inventor of an armored turret.
Cooke, John Rogers. Colonel, C.S. Army; commander of Cooke's brigade, Army of Northern Virginia.
Cushing, William "Will" Alonzo. Lieutenant, U.S. Navy; noted for his daring special operations.
Custer, George Armstrong. Brigadier General, U.S. Volunteers; commander, 2nd Brigade, Cavalry Division, Army of the Hudson.
Dahlgren, John. Rear admiral, U.S. Navy; commander of the Southern Blockading Squadron; known as the Father of American Naval Ordnance.