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

by Peter G. Tsouras

  MOUNT VERNON ESTATE, VIRGINIA, 4:10 PM, OCTOBER 25, 1863

  The lieutenant kept the guards at their posts by sheer force of cool example. He stood square in the center of the gate to Mount Vernon. His two guards stood at either gatepost at order arms. In front of him a Confederate cavalry troop stood stock still, their only motion the swishing of their horses' tails. The troop's officer was a slim Californian from San Francisco who had come back across the continent to defend the Union. Fate had placed him in command of the small guard force placed on George Washington's estate eight miles south of Alexandria.

  Great battles had passed the lieutenant by as he stood his post. Both sides had put Mount Vernon off limits to their troops, and the Union had placed a guard to make sure neither side violated the sacred ground. Both Blue and Gray revered Washington, and it had been an honorable but uneventful duty for the lieutenant and his handful of men. The gentle but iron-willed ladies of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, who had rescued the estate from decay just before the war, had been most kind to them. The ladies themselves had camped out in the mansion itself to make sure no harm came to it. The war that had seemed far away now stood right in front of him.

  The clatter of more approaching horses turned the Confederate cavalry commander in his saddle. He straightened up immediately and called his command to attention. The command staff of the Army of Northern Virginia rode up, its simple yellow headquarters flag with the black initials "ANY" waving above to blend with the first of the leaves turning in the unusual early autumn cold.

  No one could mistake Lee on his big gray horse, Traveller. He dismounted in front of the gate, followed by a single aide. There was no Union soldier who had not seen a likeness of Lee. He took a step forward. The lieutenant cried out, "Present arms!" The bayoneted rifles rose in one swift movement with a snap that would have impressed the Grenadier Guards. The lieutenant had filled the boring hours with drill and ceremony. He brought his own sword to present arms as well. Lee returned the salute. "Order, arms!" The rifle butts slammed into the ground and the lieutenant's sword swept to the side before he returned it to his scabbard.

  Lee's brown eyes misted up a bit. "Lieutenant, I beg your permission to present my respects at the tomb of General Washington."'

  MOUNT EAGLE, ALEXANDRIA, VA, 4:49 PM, OCTOBER 25, 1863

  From this high point in the defenses of Washington, one of Colonel Lowe's balloons floated in a light breeze. A guest in the balloon was a twenty-five-year-old Prussian count, Capt. Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a military observer. Zeppelin had been fascinated with the balloons and had been introduced to Lowe through one of his German-born assistants. Lowe had taken to the engaging young man and gladly approved his request to ascend with him.2 From this vantage point, they all could see the entire region in the crisp fall air. What was clear from that altitude was what was going to be called the Washington Races. The fate of the capital rested on who would win.

  That race was between the butternut and gray columns of Lee's army and the blue of Meade's army. Lee had sidestepped Meade in series of rapid maneuvers that would be studied for generations. Meade's already sharp tongue had been honed to the edge of a surgical scalpel by the stress of the last ten days as Lee had worked him away from Washington. His staff felt the edge of that tongue as Meade summoned every last bit of his considerable professional talents, but he knew in his heart that he had been outclassed. Now those Rebel columns had moved like quicksilver around him to the south to march up parallel to the Potomac. Alexandria, with its huge depots, railroad yards, and hospitals, was within Lee's grasp if he could get through the ring of forts that had grown up around the capital. Once that ring was pierced and Alexandria taken, Lee would sweep up the few miles of the Virginia shore of the Potomac until he was opposite Washington.

  Lee knew the exact spot on the Virginia shore from which to direct his artillery. Arlington House overlooked the city from a hill and would give him perfect observation of Washington. It had been his wife's property; Lee had carefully managed it back from his father-in-law's mismanagement. Shortly after the firing on Fort Sumter, the Union Army had occupied the estate and used the mansion as the headquarters to oversee the construction of the ring of fortifications around Washington. The Lees had left most of their property in the mansion when Lee had moved to Richmond to offer his services to the new Confederacy. Wolseley himself had been affected by Lee's account of the vandalizing of his estate, during which tears had coursed down his face. Since the Lees had moved to Richmond

  every injury that it was possible to inflict, the Northerners have heaped upon him. His house on the Pamunky river was burnt to the ground and the slaves carried away, many of them by force; while his residence on the Arlington Heights was not only gutted of its furniture, but even the very relics of George Washington were stolen from it and paraded in triumph in the saloons of New York and Boston.'

  Furniture or no, the Lees were about to come home.

  Almost from the moment Lee had given Meade the slip, Sharpe had ordered out his own scouts and Hooker's Horse Marines. But it was Lowe's telegram warning of the glint from a river of moving bayonets that had brought Sharpe at a gallop from Washington to ascend with Lowe and Zeppelin over Mount Eagle, south of Cameron Run. From their balloon they could see the enemy columns pushing up the Mount Vernon and Telegraph roads toward Alexandria. They looked to the west for any sign of Meade's men and saw heavy road traffic in the distance on the Leesburg and Alexandria Turnpike, but whose? A line of Lowe's balloons extended for miles in a ring around Washington to the south and west to give complete coverage of the enemy's approach. They were Lowe's large Union-class balloons, each of thirty-two thousand cubic-foot capacity able to lift five men, about seven hundred and fifty pounds, in a wicker basket, and secured by four strong cables 4

  At last the morning sun illuminated the color of the approaching host, and it was not Union blue. The telegraph operator in the balloon clicked the message that flashed down the wire and out along the lines in every direction: "Lee is coming!"

  Panic had swept through Washington. The railroads leading north to Baltimore were packed with frightened civilians, not the least of which were the few of members of Congress who were in Washington during recess. Refugees poured across the bridges into Washington from the Virginia side as Alexandria was evacuated of nonessential personnel. At the same time, troops from the city's defenses on its Maryland side crossed the bridges into Virginia to strengthen the forts. Army engineers set the bridges over the Potomac and the Alexandria warehouses for demolition. Even Stanton, who had been a rock under the pounding from Britannia's fist, was overwhelmed as the rebellion approached to the gates of Washington.

  Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, who had more reason to be demoralized, stubbornly refused to give in to doubt. Nothing but had news had come over the wires in the last week. The French Navy had suddenly appeared off Galveston the week before and destroyed the entire West Gulf Blockading Squadron. Nothing had been heard of the East Gulf Blockading Squadron off Mobile. But rumors had run up the coast and leaped out of Reheldom with triumph that Dahlgren's squadron had been destroyed as well off Charleston. Three days ago, the Royal Navy had swept into Hampton Roads and come up Chesapeake Bay in a forest of sails, including at least one of its huge ironclads, famous blackhulled Warrior. The light American ships had either been run down by the British or prudently retreated up the shallow rivers like the James where the deep-draft enemy ships could not follow. The large naval base at Norfolk had been blockaded. At every hand, fearful voices had said it was 1814 all over again-when the Royal Navy had ravaged the settlements of the great bay and made the country drink shame and humiliation to the dregs.

  Welles faced down Stanton, who insisted that Lincoln evacuate the capital before Lee and the British arrived. "Stanton, I told you last year when you were in a panic that the Rebel ironclad Virginia was about to ascend the river and subdue the entire capital that it drew too much water to get past Kettle Bottom Sh
oals. And that's fifty miles down the river. If Virginia couldn't make it with twenty-three feet of draft, how do you expect those British monsters with twenty-six feet of draft to do it?"5

  Stanton was literally wringing his hands, "But the British got up the river in 1814!"

  Welles snorted in contempt. "Yes, and it took them twenty days to get through Kettle Bottom because they kept grounding on the shoals, and they have bigger ships today. I guarantee you will not see Warrior coming up the river. If any of their ships get through, it will he their smaller ships. We still have the river forts and gunboats and plenty of guns at the Navy Yard."

  "But. .."

  "Stanton, let me worry about the Navy. I would think you have as much as you can handle with Lee."

  A clerk ran in and handed Lincoln a telegram. He raised his hand, "I have a telegram from Sharpe." The room went silent. "Lee himself is on his way up from Mount Vernon; Sharpe expects the rebels to be in front of the forts within an hour. Let us pray the forts hold until Meade arrives."

  Lincoln had good reason for his confidence in the dense ring of fortifications around the capital. Since his arrival in Washington,

  ... from a few isolated works covering bridges or commanding a few especially important points, was developed a connected system of fortification by which every prominent point, at intervals of 800 to 1,000 yards, was occupied by an inclosed [sic] field-fort, every important approach or depress of ground, unseen from the forts, swept by a battery of field-guns, and the whole connected by rifle-trenches which were in fact lines of infantry parapet, furnishing emplacement for two ranks of men and affording covered communication along the line, while roads were opened wherever necessary, so that troops and artillery could he moved rapidly form one point of the immense periphery to another, or under cover, from point to point along the line.'

  These defenses had much to defend besides the seat of government. Although Alexandria served as a major subsidiary depot for supplies, Washington itself was the Union's primary and largest logistics center. As one observer noted:

  Hardly had war begun when camps, warehouses, depots, immense stacks of ammunition, food, equipment and long rows of cannon, caissons, wagons and ambulances began sprouting up all over town in vacant lots and open spaces. Centers of activity included the Navy Yard, the Army Arsenal and the Potomac wharves at Sixth and Seventh Streets SW. By 1863 another huh of activity had grown along the Maryland Avenue railroad yards. These busy centers lined the southern rim of the city fronting on the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers.'

  Ships unloaded off the Potomac along the Arsenal wharves and off the Eastern Branch south of the Navy Yard where the channel was deepest.'

  The area of Foggy Bottom saw the concentration of a mass of supplies, equipment and material, and storehouses. There was also a remount depot for approximately thirty thousand horses and mules. The large open area near the unfinished Washington Monument was a huge slaughtering yard for cattle. Near the Capitol, another collection of supply warehouses and yards grew up along Tiber Creek near the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad depot and repair yards. More facilities of every kind were scattered throughout the rest of the city.' Originally named Goose Creek, this tributary of the Potomac had been given its grander title in hopeful emulation of la cittd eterna. It had later been converted into the Washington Canal, which was crossed at intervals by high iron bridges. It failed in its purpose as a major thoroughfare and degenerated into an open sewer that emptied into the Potomac just south of the Presidential Park, which led north to the White House.

  The Washington Arsenal was the largest of the government's twenty-eight arsenals and armories and specialized in the assembly and storage of munitions and the storage of artillery. Its complex of buildings - foundries, workshops, laboratories, and magazines - occupied the southern tip of the city where the Potomac and Eastern Branch Rivers met. It had a large workforce, including over one hundred women and two hundred boys whose fine motor skills were preferred for the delicate tasks of assembling the munitions, which ranged from rifle cartridges to artillery shells.

  Outside its gates lay a number of captured bronze guns from the victories of Saratoga, Yorktown, Niagara, and Vera Cruz. When the British marched on Washington in 1814, Arsenal workers had hidden gunpowder down a well. A large party of British soldiers swarmed over the site, and one carelessly threw a lighted match down the well onto the gunpowder bags, destroying every building in the Arsenal.1°

  The Navy Yard in southeast Washington lay along the Eastern Branch to the uppermost point of navigation. Directly above it was an old, rickety, wooden bridge that connected Washington to Maryland. The Navy Yard was the premier of the Navy's great yards, and its vast foundries and dry docks were a major production center for Dahlgren guns and the more complicated mechanical devices of war. It was there that Lowe's gas-generating equipment was fabricated by the teams of skilled mechanics and artisans and where those same teams had built the experimental Alligator-class submarines that Dahlgren had used so well at Charleston. The Yard's facilities were so complete that entire ships could be built, repaired, or converted from merchant to naval service there as Gettysburg had been. The Navy Yard was a major military objective in itself.

  When the war began, Washington's population had been about seventy-five thousand; in the subsequent two and a half years, it had almost doubled and had provoked a vast spate of building. Nevertheless, a view of the city's street plan would still have been misleading. The neat grid did not reflect reality. Much of the land of the city was still uninhabited. That was especially true of the large section south of Tiber Creek, which was called "The Island" because it was bound largely by the creek and the Potomac. Its most important and only civic building was the Gothic Smithsonian Institution. Along the ends of 6th Street and 7th Street, SW, were the wharves and docks for the river and sea traffic that connected the city to Alexandria, Aquia Creek, the Chesapeake Bay, and finally the sea " The Island also contained the most important military installa- Lion in the District of Columbia- the Washington Arsenal. Just outside the southeastern outlet of the canal into the Eastern Branch was the Washington Navy Yard. Outside each installation, small communities had grown up to house their employees and the military personnel assigned to them. The Marine Barracks were only a block beyond the Navy Yard. The country between these installations and the rest of the city was largely uninhabited. An omnibus to the rest of the city connected the Yard.l" Thus two of the country's most important military installations were self-contained and not physically part of the city. They were also on the southern and southeastern edge of the city and most easily accessible to an attack up the Potomac.

  The most densely built-up part of the city ran east and north of the canal. Across the canal and along 10th Street, NW, was Hooker's Division. The canal emptied into the Potomac where the forlorn stub of the incomplete Washington Monument stood almost on the water's edge. Running just inland from the monument was the major thoroughfare of 14th Street, which connected to the immense wooden Long Bridge that spanned the Potomac. Earlier that year, the Army had constructed a railroad bridge to parallel the Long Bridge. A few houses and a hotel clustered around the bridge entrance. Small guardposts at either end of the bridge checked all traffic.13

  The fall of Washington now would not only paralyze the national government, but would also disorder the logistics of the war effort and bring it to a halt. "These depots, the arsenal, the large Quartermaster and Subsistence depots in the city, and the branch Quartermaster depot in Alexandria served the country, the nearby armies, and the army activities in and near the city."14

  As the Cabinet officers left the White House, Stanton noticed the military guard around the building was much heavier than the small detachment that had been there before. He accosted the officer of the guard and demanded to know who had assigned these men. His jaw set when told it was the 120th New York Volunteers. Stanton turned his formidable personality on the young man. "And who ordered you here, Captain?"
/>   "General Sharpe did, Mr. Secretary."

  The first thing Stanton did on his return to his office was to call in Lafayette Baker. Stanton paced back and forth in front of his fireplace. "Baker, I want you to increase the number of detectives you have protecting the president."

  Baker had been fully aware of how Sharpe's New Yorkers had taken over security of the White House. That was getting too close to Baker's responsibility to protect the president himself. It did not take a genius to know that someone was crowding his territory, in more ways than one. He had already identified Sharpe as a rival and therefore an enemy, especially after he became aware of inquiries that seemed to point back at Sharpe about Baker's own extrajudicial methods that poured money into his pockets.

  Baker was quick off the mark. Stanton had offered him an opportunity to reassert his power, and he snatched at it. "Yes, Mr. Secretary. I have already seen to it two days ago. The new man's done excellent work already. Comes from Indiana with the highest recommendations as a bodyguard."

  "Keep an eye on this, Baker. Take nothing for granted." 15

  THE DOCKS, 7TH STREET, SW, WASHINGTON, D.C., 5:22 AM, OCTOBER 26, 1863

  Booth reveled in the melodrama of their meeting. For him, the passions of the stage were indistinguishable from those of life and death. Now, under the gas lamplight on the river docks with the mist rising off the river from the kiss of the cold fall air on the water, he was in his element. He waved his silver-headed cane as if it were a sword. Smoke, for his part, did not suffer from such flights of imagination; it was not a survival trait in his line of work. Booth was a tool in his larger plan, a tiresome tool that required more tact to handle than Smoke liked to expend, but he was all he had to work with. If he had thought to look back on the efforts to reel Booth into the plan and keep him on it, he would have marveled at how he had risen to the occasion. But Smoke was not a man for reflection; he was a man to follow orders, the subject of their meeting under the gaslight.