A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril an Alternate History

by Peter G. Tsouras

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C., 1:28 PM, OCTOBER 21, 1863

  The president's private secretary, John Nicolay, pointed upstairs to the parlor where Lincoln received visitors. Sharpe had become almost a member of the White House staff, which was quite aware of his standing in Lincoln's opinion. To Sharpe's amazement, he had found himself going from a staff colonel in a field army to a trusted advisor and confidant of the president. Lincoln had added the stars of a brigadier general to emphasize his favor. It was all an enormous compliment from the man who was always on the scent of good advice.

  Sharpe was walking down the hallway to Lincoln's parlor when the door burst open and Senator Benjamin Wade, one of the hardest of the Hard War Republicans, strode out, his face red with anger. He barely mumbled an apology as he brushed past Sharpe.

  Sharpe poked his head into the parlor. Lincoln was sitting at his desk, leaning back in his swivel chair with a look of mirth on his face. "I fear I have made Senator Wade my enemy for life," he said. "He was just here now, urging me to dismiss Grant, and in response to something he said, I answered, 'Senator, that reminds me of a story.' I had not even got one foot in the story when he said, 'It is with you all story, story! You are letting this country go to hell with your stories, sir! You are not more than a mile away from it this minute."'

  "What did you answer?" Sharpe asked.

  "I asked good-naturedly if that was not just about the distance from here to the Senate Chamber. He was very angry, and grabbed up his hat and went off."'

  Wade, like so many of the movers and shakers, missed the powerful didactic purpose of Lincoln's storytelling. His cabinet had come around to it, though the pompous did find it trying, but he also used storytelling to let a man down easily or sooth a ruffled feeling. He was as much at home telling stories to the workers at the Washington Navy Yard and the troops in the field as he was to his cabinet and the members of Congress and the endless stream of politicians and generals that flowed through his parlor. And he has the same ability to convulse a crowed of sunburned infantry as the most refined aristos of the Northeast with the same, often bawdy, story.

  A raconteur like Sharpe was not alarmed. He knew that a good line was apt to have a delayed effect. "I wouldn't worry too much about Senator Wade, sir."

  "Oh, I know. He's a good man under that stuffed shirt. He'll chew on my comment and come around. He won't let it come between us and our great work. That reminds me of a famous politician from Illinois, recently deceased, whose undeniable merit was blemished by an overweening vanity. If he had known how big a funeral he would have had, he would have died years ago."2

  Sharpe had a good laugh, and then traded just as good a story. Lincoln batted back an even better one. Sharpe waited for Lincoln to bring up the reason for calling him over, and that was soon coming.

  "Sharpe, did I ever tell you about the lectures I used to give on the wonders of American invention?"

  Sharpe knew he was now playing straight man and answered on cue, intrigued by what would come next. "No, sir, I don't think you did."

  Lincoln's eyes twinkled, "Well, if I do say so, I gave a pretty good lecture on the marvels rolling out of the brains in this country and abroad. I used to talk about the enthusiasm for invention that would infect a certain sort of fellow something powerful. I said of this type, 'He has a great passion-a perfect rage-for the new. His horror is for all that is old, particularly Old Fog; and if there be anything old which he can endure, it is only old whiskey and old tobacco.'3

  "Well, Sharpe, I've been thinking that these wars we have got ourselves into require just that sort of fellow. If we are to survive, we have to have that perfect rage for the new. Old Fog just keeps us even with the enemy. Ripley was 'Old Fog' in the flesh, you know. Called everything new 'new-fangled gimcracks' and gave me a devil of a time getting those repeaters into the hands of the troops, not to mention my coffee mill gun. Replacing him last month as chief of ordnance for the Army was just a start.

  "I figure, Sharpe, that the enemy might get that perfect rage for those new-(angled gimcracks, too. Now that would just tear things. As I see it, invention gives us an advantage with our monitors and repeaters, not to mention the balloons. But, Sharpe, Britain is called the 'Workshop of the World' for good reason. Why, their factories, forges, and arsenals have kept the Confederates in the field for two years without causing one British soldier or sailor to do without so much as a hardtack. Throw in the French, too. They can even fight a war on our doorstep without anyone in Paris doing without milk in his coffee. And they can do this by just being Old Fog.

  "Take niter for example. We need it to make gunpowder, and they've got it in India, or most of it. And we can't buy it now. And with their blockade, we can't buy it from the new sources in Chile either. Luckily, I had Pete Dupont quietly buy up so much we have eight million pounds in reserve, but that will only last for one year or less. But to hedge our bets, I had a fellow named Isaac Diller working on a substitute based on chlorate. Well, I've spent a fortune on it, and he gets a very good powder, but they just can't grain it.4 We had a demonstration a few days ago, and all I can say is 'small potatoes and few in a hill.' What a bust!"

  Lincoln was walking around the room now as he spoke, his hands clutching his lapels. "Of course, we could do what the Rebels are doing and work through every cave and dung heap for niter, but that would be a drop in the bucket. Pete Dupont tells me, though, his chemists are working on something called guncotton, but that will still require niter. Now if we could only figure out a way to make niter here at home."

  Sharpe wondered what Lincoln was up to. He had fingers in more pies than even Lincoln knew, but munitions production was not one of them.

  "Pete tells me that some Germans have been working on this guncotton for twenty years, but they haven't been able to find out too much." He looked over his reading glasses, perched on the end of his nose. "Do you think you might he able to help him there?"

  Sharpe grasped the thread immediately. "Of course, sir. But with the blockade, it is a time-consuming process to get our agents out of the country and to Europe. Our Irish friends, though, have a talent for slipping over the Canadian border and transforming themselves into loyal subjects of the queen. I'll see what I can do."

  Lincoln said, "I have plans for the Irish as well, but we'll talk of that later." He looked away as if in lost in thought for a moment, then turned back to Sharpe.

  "You see, Sharpe, if we try to match Old Fog to Old Fog with the British and French, we will lose hands down. That plays against our nature as a people. Our ancestors left Europe to get away from Old Fog for God's sake. Now that the full weight of their power has fallen upon us, we must rely on the strength of our nature, and avoid anything Old Fog like the plague, excepting, of course, old whiskey and old tobacco.

  "And then there's Doctor Johnson's famous observation that the prospect of getting hanged concentrates the mind wonderfully. The British and French have done us a great favor in a way. They have swept away the doubts and the opposition. The mind of the people is wonderfully concentrated. I tell you, Sharpe, when a New York Brahmin like Theodore Roosevelt, who has avoided service in the war, begs me to allow him to raise a regiment and pay for its equipment out of his own pocket, our enemies have conjured a miracle."

  Sharpe interrupted, "In all fairness, sir, I think the reason that Roosevelt did not join up before was his very Southern wife. Her brother is the same James Bulloch, the Confederate agent in Britain who built Alabama. A younger brother serves on her still. His wife would have left him if he had joined."

  "You don't say! Well, I can sympathize. Mrs. Lincoln's brothers are all in gray, too, but I'm a luckier man than Roosevelt. There's no way Mrs. Lincoln would leave the White House." He winked at Sharpe.

  His face grew long again as he picked up his earlier thread. "Of course, the Copperhead treason has made the Midwest vomit equivocation up. It's a foolhardy man who speaks out against the war now. The country is as united as it was t
he day after Sumter was fired upon, but now it is steeled as well. The problem, Sharpe, is to make the best use of this unity, for if we don't, it will just evaporate, and the enemy will grind us down. And they can do it, too. With a British army in Albany and a French army marching on New Orleans, they could beat us before we even figure out what we are doing."

  He went over to the desk and picked up a rifle that had been leaning against its other side. "This is what I mean, this fine repeater built by Chris Spencer." He cocked the piece in a smooth action. "I hear the boys who have them say that you can load it on Sunday and fire all week. And the Rebels are scared to death of them. It's too had that we don't have tens of thousands of them now, but that's water under the bridge."

  Sharpe spoke up, "I saw what the Sharps repeater did at Gettysburg, sir. A few companies of the Berdan's Sharpshooters laid the enemy out by the hundreds."

  "Just so, just so." Lincoln was pacing back and forth in front of Sharpe faster now that he was worked up to the subject. "The problem is that Spencer just can't make them fast enough. There are too many different repeaters being made, and he can't get the machines and men to make them. That's why I've asked Andy Carnegie to look into working this knot out of the string." Sharpe had met Carnegie several months ago when he had come to Washington. Secretary of war representative Charles Dana had introduced them, called him that "little Scotch devil," and recounted how at the very beginning of the war he had marshaled the railroads to get reinforcements to Washington in the nick of time to save the city and had worked out the plan for the nation's telegraph systems to support the government. He was a man who could see to the heart of any organizational problem, conceive a solution, and then find the right men to execute it. He put a premium on initiative and good judgment.

  "That's why I want you and Charlie Dana and Gus Fox, and the Army and Navy chiefs of ordnance, to work with him. The way I see it, you ferret out anything useful going on in Europe and keep an ear open if the enemy suddenly steps out of character and develops a passion for the new."

  PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND, 6:20 PM, OCTOBER 21, 1863

  Crowds of well-wishers and families packed the docks along with the county notables of Devon to give a rousing send-off to the 1st Devonshire Rifle Volunteers embarking for Ireland where they were to take over the Dublin garrison duties of the recently departed 41st Foot. Although a Navy town, Plymouth had gone all out to take care of her own county volunteers. Each man received a package with needle and thread, writing paper, tins of sardines, bottles of jam, and a prayer book as he boarded the ship.

  Such scenes were being reenacted all over the British Isles as Britain mobilized for the American war. Britain's small regular army of two hundred and twenty thousand had been spread around the world, with barely seventy thousand men left in the British Isles. Already more than twenty thousand of them had been sent to British North America, with many more scheduled to go despite the winter seas. The next largest concentration of troops was the fifty thousand men in India, but the embers of the Great Mutiny still glowed hot in British eyes, and the government had determined that India would not be asked for a single man. The jewel in the crown was the greatest source of Imperial wealth and could not be risked. The Mediterranean garrisons held twelve thousand men, and New Zealand and South Africa held five thousand each. Another three thousand men garrisoned Hong Kong. Only limited numbers could be drawn from these garrisons. The Maoris in New Zealand had only recently been subdued after desperate fighting, and depleting that garrison would be imprudent.

  But Britain had other resources. Where France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia relied upon conscription, the British had the innate and eager patriotism of her people. Her old county militias, numbering one hundred and thirty thousand men, produced a flood of individual volunteers to fill out and expand the regular infantry battalions. In the Crimean War, ninety thousand militia members had volunteered for regular service, and ten thousand served overseas. The Yeomanry added fourteen thousand cavalry commanded by the great landowners whose tenants filled the ranks. The greatest addition to British strength was a far more recent organization, the Volunteer Rifle Corps (VRC). Barely five years before, tensions with France had boiled to the point that a French invasion was taken with deadly seriousness. In 1859 the secretary of state for war had called for the raising of the VRC in England, Wales, and Scotland. Ireland was pointedly ignored. Volunteers were to provide their own clothing and equipment, which put a firm middle-class stamp on the new formations. Most eschewed regular red for the green, gray, and black of the rifle corps to set themselves apart. The regulars were only too thankful that their scarlet would not be worn by these amateurs. The VRC was such a success that by 1862 it numbered 162,000 men, of which 134,000 were in rifle battalions, fully equaling the infantry strength of the regulars. Almost fifty thousand men were consolidated into eighty-six deployable battalions and the rest in administrative battalions. The Royal Small Arms Factory Enfield, aided by commercial arms makers, had been easily able to arm the entire force with the superb Enfield Rifle.'

  In short order, Britain had doubled its army, a remarkable feat for a country for which conscription was anathema. Yet, as with the rapid expansion of the Union Army, the iron judgment of Socrates held -a body of men is no more an army than a pile of building materials is a house. It would take time for the regulars to absorb the militia volunteers and for the Yeomanry horse and the VRC to work up to the level where they would be more dangerous to an enemy than themselves. Until then, it would be the Thin Red Line upon which the Empire depended.

  HUGHENDEN MANOR, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, ENGLAND, 6:25 PM, OCTOBER 21, 1863

  Benjamin Disraeli sat gazing into the flames that leaped and crackled in the fireplace of his library. The dancing light illuminated its "writingtables, couches covered with yellow stain and profusely gilt, oak cabinets ornamented with caryatides, columns and entablatures of Dresden china." This room had been his joy but of late had been refuge from a world that seemed to have passed him by.'

  To say that he was one of the most interesting men of his time would have been an understatement. He was stoop-shouldered, thin, dark-complexioned, with one very carefully arranged black curl draped over his forehead. Born into a Jewish family who had made their way to England after the expulsion from Spain, his father had him baptized into the Church of England after a dispute with his synagogue. Although an observant Anglican, he reveled in his Jewish heritage. On one occasion, he threw back an anti-Semitic insult, "Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon."

  His youth had been so bohemian as to earn him the epithet of "revolting fop," but ambition had harnessed his appetites and channeled them into politics where he had risen to the leadership of the Conservative, or Tory, Party. He had become what he admired most, a country gentleman, a member of the establishment-no mean feat for a man whose father had held the Torah. Disraeli still found time to write a series of well-received novels and become noted for droll wit:

  It would have been a good dinner, if The soup had been as warm as the champagne or The beef had been as rare as the service or The brandy had been as old as the woman on his left or The woman on his right had been as Hansom as the cab he took home.'

  He had had a circle of friends who so valued his political genius that they had bought him this estate, paid many of his debts, and found a suitably rich wife for him-prerequisites for the Tory leadership. Mary Anne was twelve years his senior, causing some cruel wit to quote the Bard, "Who cares if the bag is old as long as it's full of gold." They had shocked society and fallen deeply in love, and he liked to say that he had married for money but now would marry her again for love.

  She doted on him and now fretted that he had seemed to suddenly age. Friends in the House had whispered that he nodded off more often than not. His slight frame seemed to shrink in on itself, and his dark complexion became even more sallow. The single
dark curl that he so ostentatiously wore down his forehead seemed to whither away. Then war had come, and he had unexpectedly arrived at Hughenden even though the House still sat. He strode through the estate's grounds he loved so much with a quickness she had not seen in years.

  That night, the noise of a carriage arriving over the gravel roadway brought him from his fire to the door. He flung it open to the shock of his butler and ran down the steps though the rain as a man in a black Quaker coat stepped out the carriage. "Bright, so good of you to come. Please, come inside. I have a good fire to take the chill off."

  They paused only long enough for Bright to greet Mary Anne, who ordered coffee and a meal to he sent to the library as Disraeli slid the doors shut. He turned to look at the man who had insulted him only a few days before. The day after Bright's speech in the house, he had gone to a chophouse for a meal. Disraeli had followed him in and said, "Bright, I would give all I ever had to have made that speech you made just now."

  Bright looked at him straight and said, "Well, you might have made it if you had been honest."8

  In relating that incident to a friend, he had said, "Politics is like war-a roughish business. We should not be over-sensitive. We have enough to do without imaginary grievances."9 Any offense had been swallowed up by a realization that Bright was right. It was a had war fought for the worst reasons, but the Tories had been swept up with the rest to avenge the insult to the nation. They had even more reason to press such a war. The Tories were the party of privilege and tradition, landed power of the most ancient kind, the very ones to find empathy with the South. Still, Disraeli had not made a career out of such stolid ideas but as a reformer and had dragged his party along. He had particularly generous to the United States in its fratricide. Addressing Parliament, he had said: