Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War

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KAMERINSKI WOODS, OUTSIDE LODZ, POLAND, JULY 12, 1863

The sweat ran down his face as he lay hidden in the cool Polish forest. Jan Szmanda’s heart pounded as he aimed his musket at the cavalry patrol wending its way along the narrow woodworkers’ road. There were fifteen Cossacks, their lances bobbing with the canter, and an officer who rode at their head, his whip dangling from its loop around his wrist. He was the same one who had “pacified” the three surrounding villages and left them filled with corpses dangling from the trees. “God save Poland,” Jan prayed.

“Wait…wait…wait,” he told himself. He chose the officer as his target and waited, waited. The seconds seemed like hours, then CRACK, the first shot broke the silence of the woods. The officer lurched in his saddle, and Jan’s finger pulled the trigger as did twenty other Poles. Unfortunately, almost everyone had aimed at the officer, the result of amateurs at war. Man and horse sprayed blood as they thrashed into the trees.

The Cossack sergeant had seen this twenty years before in the forests of Chechnya and had not forgotten its lessons. “Into the woods, my children!” he shouted as they lowered their lances, and he spurred his horse into the trees still shrouded by the black powder smoke. They had practiced this often, these men who fought the border wars of the empire. Their nimble horses dashed through the spaced trees of this well-tended estate forest. Jan saw them come as he frantically tried to reload, but it was too late. The beast was upon him as he cast away the rifle and fled. He dodged among the trees with the quickness of his seventeen years, but the Cossack’s pony was swifter as it followed. The sergeant could see his prey glancing back wide-eyed with terror as the distance closed. Then with a move he had practiced a thousand times and executed for real too many times to count, he picked the spot on the boy’s back just below the left shoulder blade, low enough to miss it and high enough to avoid the ribs. He leaned forward in the saddle, his boots pressing into the stirrups to cushion the blow and channel the shock through the horse to the ground. Jan looked back one last time and shrieked. Just then the Cossack struck, driving the lance’s point through the boy’s back and into his heart. He choked on a scream as his body ran forward a pace or two on its own momentum, and the Cossack jerked out the point in a deft move. He passed the corpse as it went tumbling head over heels into the leaves.

It was over in ten minutes. Thirteen dead Poles and against one Cossack officer-a bad trade, the sergeant thought, if one didn’t take into account what a prick Lieutenant Golitsyn had been, but he was thankful it was not Chechens that had sprung the ambush. Those bastards knew what they were about. No Chechen would have flinched from a one-on-one fight with even a mounted Cossack-not like these Polish amateurs in revolt against their God-anointed ruler, the Czar Emperor Alexander II.

Yes, God save Poland, save it from its geography and its pride. It was the pride of this people that kept them hung on this Russian cross. Had they given up their pride and settled for assimilation and Russianization, boys like Jan would still be alive, albeit with a cringe in his bearing.

As the blood of the Napoleonic Wars dried thirty-five years before, the victors apportioned the thrones of Europe. Napoleon III had toyed with the re-creation of the Polish state as an ally. The victors did him better. They re-created the kingdom of Poland and then threw it to the wolf in the Kremlin, awarding its crown to the Russian Czar to add to his collection of crowns. The heavy Russian hand finally provoked a widespread revolt in January that by July was in its failed last stage.

ORPHAN ASYLUM FOR COLORED CHILDREN, FIFTH AVENUE AND FORTY-THIRD STREET, NEW YORK, JULY 13, 1863

Bricks shattered the ground-floor windows, and the large double door thudded with the blows of clubs. Outside the mob howled like a blood-drunk beast. “Burn the nigger nest!” was the shout that turned into a chant, a chant with a distinct Celtic lilt, at that. Inside the asylum the white matron coolly organized the evacuation out the back doors of her 237 young wards, all younger than the age of twelve. Her Negro handyman, old gray-haired Willie Washington, stood back from the doors, a fire ax at the ready.

The city was in the grip of a riot. The reading of the draft draw had been a match thrown into kerosene. It was hugely unpopular among the working classes of New York, especially the mass of Irish immigrants who competed with free blacks for the bottom rung of the economic ladder. A hot, sticky July had settled on the city, feeding the discontent. Gangs appeared on the streets in the morning. A single pistol shot was fired in the crowded offices of the District Draft Office on Third Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street. The police guard was barely able to get the draft officials out of the building before it went up in flames.

Rushing to the scene, Police Commissioner John Kennedy was set upon by the rioters and clubbed to the ground. He staggered to his feet and tried to run, but the mob brought him down for another beating. The mobs grew like a fire racing through dry tinder and came across a detachment of soldiers from the Invalid Corps, men too incapacitated by their wounds to serve in the field. Surprised, the troops got off a ragged volley that only enraged the rioters who surged over the soldiers, killing two and wounding fifteen.

Guided by more than instinct, the mob surged to the Armory at Second Avenue and Twenty-First Street. The police defense collapsed after an hour and a half. Now the mob was armed as it left the Armory also in flames. Leaders appeared who sported the cutout of the Indian head of a penny on their lapels, egging the rioters on and pointing out new targets for their wrath. The mobs were spreading like a cancer throughout the city now, aiming a special wrath at Negroes. As fire licked the Armory roof, the Orphan Asylum drew another mob.¹

As the last of her wards disappeared through the back gate, the matron went back into the building to tell Willie he could abandon his post. Too late, she saw the door splinter apart and its fragments swing back on their hinges. The old man had straightened his bent back and flew into the crowd as it burst in, his ax arched over his head to sink into the face of the first man through. Blood gushed over the crowd as Willie wrenched the ax free. He did not get a second swing as the pack fell on him.

OUTSKIRTS OF CINCINNATI, OHIO, NIGHT OF JULY 13–14, 1863

Utter exhaustion gripped the remnants of the brigade as it staggered forward into the night, its way lit by torches wrapped with looted calico. So bone weary were man and beast that the cavalrymen sought out in the torchlight the path of those gone before from the spattered lather that dripped from their horses’ mouths.

No Confederate force had ever penetrated so far into Yankeedom as the cavalry rode around the Ohio metropolis, too tired now to think of taking it. Col. John Hunt Morgan’s foray into the north had been his own initiative. He had not bothered to inform his commander, Lt. Gen. Braxton Bragg, commanding the Army of Tennessee. Morgan’s fame had grown from his raider’s instincts and flair for leadership, qualities that chaffed under Bragg’s limp hand.

Morgan had left a trail of burned railroad bridges and factories, looted homes and stores, plundered payrolls, and roused state governments in Indiana and Ohio. Morgan’s leadership talents had not extended to the discipline of his men, who went on an uncontrollable rampage as they rode through southeastern Indiana. Capt. Henry Thomas Hines, one of his most intrepid company commanders, was beside himself in anger at this thoughtless display. Lithe and dark-haired, barely 130 pounds, the daring young Hines had more than once been likened to the rising star of the famous Booth family of actors, John Wilkes Booth. Looks aside, Hines had far better control of his emotions than the tempestuous actor. He had to swallow his dismay that Morgan was casting away the very allies he had sought to find among the disloyal elements in these states. He had returned from a June foray in the region and sought out the leaders of this movement and been promised their willing support.

These were the Copperheads, men who called themselves the Sons of Liberty or Knights of the Golden Circle. They wore the Indian head on their lapels. Others were less charitable in their political sentiments, and for them the word “Copperhead” meant the serpent that hid in the grass and struck without warning. The North in this ever-bleeding war was rife with such men for whom nothing was worth all the bloodshed, and yet they were willing to shed more blood to stop it.

Mostly they were Democrats who could not abide the war for the Union and emancipation, close cousins to the Southern branch of their party, and so disaffected that they made common cause with those same rebels. They obstructed the war effort and made a special attempt to stop the Army’s recruiting. Their political agitation was intense as their rage against “King Lincoln” swelled with bile. President Abraham Lincoln could be sure of a kinder reception in Richmond than in some parts of the Midwest. He had had the temerity to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and round up a few hundred such agitators. But he had only skimmed the indiscreet surface of where the Copperheads seethed and plotted. Whatever they called themselves, they were united in their determination to seize power and overthrow the Lincoln administration.

Their leader was the fiery Ohio orator and politician, Klement Vallandingham, who Lincoln had convicted of treason and exiled to the Confederacy in May in an act of executive common sense that had the civil libertarians up in arms. That hardly bothered Lincoln, who saw a danger that these critics did not when he explained that he was willing to bend the Constitution here and there to save the entire document. On his Fourth of July address to Congress in 1862 he had asked “whether all the laws but one were to go unexecuted… and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” There in a nutshell was the common sense of the matter.³

Once cast into the Confederacy, Vallandingham had gone straight to Bragg’s headquarters and then to Richmond. He argued with great effect to Confederate president Jefferson Davis that the Copperheads of the Northwest would rise in revolt when the famous Gen. John Hunt Morgan led his men into their states. Captain Hines had been sent ahead in his June raid to test Vallandingham’s assurances. Specifically, he was to search out Dr. William Bowles, an acknowledged Copperhead leader in southern Indiana who had not hesitated to defy both state and federal authority. Hines found him at French Lick in command of a gang known as “Bowles’s Army”-deserters and escaped Confederate prisoners of war-armed with fine Henry rifles and Colt revolvers. Bowles was described by a historian of the movement as “about fifty-five,… a slight man with a prominent nose, glaring eyes and tufts of white hair which gave him the appearance of an outraged old eagle. Bowles had served as colonel in the Second Indiana Volunteers during the Mexican War. To him was attributed the disgraceful retreat at Buena Vista.” He promised Hines he “could command ten thousand men in twenty-four hours.”⁴

Captain Hines’s report had been the trigger that set General Morgan in motion. So secret was the mission that Jefferson Davis gave the orders directly to Morgan, pointedly bypassing Bragg. As brilliant a raider as Morgan was, he could not plan beyond the raid. Accounts of the depredations of his brigade flew ahead on the telegraph wires to every town in three states during his three-week raid on Indiana and Ohio. The many homes that displayed the single star flag of the Knights of the Golden Circle were looted just as thoroughly as those of their pro-Union neighbors. Adding insult to outrage, Morgan’s men seemed to key on such homes, laughing that the occupants should “give for the cause you love so well!”⁵

The Copperheads stayed home, while the loyal men of Indiana and Ohio rushed to join their militia and home guard units reinforced by Union Army cavalry and infantry. Now Morgan was the hunted. They harried him from place to place, closing in tighter and tighter until they trapped him on the banks of the Ohio. On July 26, he was captured along with seven hundred of his men.

Fragments of his command eluded the disaster. The captain of an Ohio River tugboat, tied up at small wharf, was startled out of his sleep by the click of a Colt Dragoon pistol being cocked by his head. Captain Hines apologized for his lack of manners but would appreciate if the good captain could get his boat away to the Kentucky shore. An hour later Hines and twenty-three men stepped back onto a friendlier territory.

KRONSTADT NAVAL BASE, ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA, 9:20 AM, JULY 15, 1863

Midshipman Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was excited about the possibilities of this new cruise aboard the frigate Aleksandr Nevsky, as the flagship of both the Baltic Squadron and the Russian Imperial Navy swung out of the naval base harbor. The excitement even took his mind away from the symphony he was composing in his head. This nineteen-year-old from Novgorod had just graduated from the Naval Academy eager to serve Czar and empire. The ships of the squadron were slipping out under the cover of an elaborate deception of an extended cruise in the Mediterranean. Maximum stores were taken aboard, and the captains were issued funds and warrants to obtain fresh provisions, coal, and repairs in neutral ports. Six ships would leave Kronstadt in staggered succession. A similar expedition was leaving from the Pacific Fleet’s base at Vladivostock. These were new ships, all steam and propeller driven, the products of the post-Crimean War shipbuilding program, all launched between 1859 and 1861.⁶

The midshipman’s berth had learned the real destination easily enough; rumor floated through the ship-New York! America! The reason was not hard to guess for any reasonably astute person. War with Britain and France over control of Poland was expected any day now. The two powers had been the guarantors of the kingdom of Poland in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna. The Russian Czar had just abolished the kingdom as a response to the Polish rising and incorporated it as a mere province into the empire. Now the powers Britain and France threatened war to rescue Poland. Nikolai stood on deck, wondering why anyone would fight over a pledge to Poland.

If war came, the Russian Navy was determined not be caught in its bases again by the Royal Navy. That had happened in the Crimean War and resulted in the fleet’s shameful impotence in that war. It would not happen again. The Czar wanted the fleet to be at sea when the war came, able to savage British and French commerce around the world. But unless it was going to be a one-way suicide mission, the Russian ships would need a secure and friendly base. There were few ports that British threats would not make untenable.

The choice of a neutral country willing to offer a base and willing to thumb its nose at Britain in the process was obvious-the United States. Russian and American strategic priorities were rapidly converging. The two countries had been on the friendliest terms since Catherine the Great formed her League of Armed Neutrality during the American Revolution to protect neutral trade with the new country from British interdiction. Since then, they had found natural attraction in the similar problems and opportunities of developing vast continents. They also shared a healthy fear of British world hegemony. For the Russians, it had been the sting of their defeat in the Crimean War that had reinforced the danger facing them. For the Americans, it had been the undisguised British desire for a Southern victory and its huge and blatant support of the rebel war effort.

Czar Alexander II and his foreign minister, Aleksandr Gorchakov, supported the survival of the Union, and their diplomatic assistance and advice in the first two years of the war had been critical. Russian advice had led to defusing the Trent Affair’s slide toward war between the United States and Great Britain in late 1861. Lincoln’s appointment of Cassius Marcellus Clay as ambassador to the imperial court had been a brilliant stroke in cementing the natural alliance between the two countries. Clay was a Southerner famous for his pro-Union and antislavery views, and he was a man not to be trifled with. He had fought and won more than one duel with his bowie knife. In Russia, he lectured on the necessity of industrializing the empire and weaning it away from its thrall to Great Britain’s manufactures. His speeches were met with thunderous applause by Russian audiences.

Yet the thought of an open-ocean voyage and the excitement of New York pushed thoughts of geopolitics from Midshipman Rimsky-Korsakov’s mind. He was intrigued by the squadron commander, whom he watched walking the bridge of the Nevsky. Adm. Stefan S. Lisovsky was a seaman to be reckoned with by all accounts. He was notorious for his irascible and ungovernable temper. Nikolai remembered a lieutenant telling the boys as Lisovsky’s appointment was announced, “Do you know what they say of him? In his last command, in a fit of wrath, he had rushed up to a sailor, guilty of some offense, and bitten off his nose!” The lieutenant crossed himself, “Dear God, it will be an interesting voyage. At least, you will be comforted, my boys, to know that the admiral felt badly enough about the nose-biting to get the poor man a pension.”

Nikolai rubbed his own nose.

WAR DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C., 3:43 PM, JULY 15, 1863

He was an impatient man, Thomas Francis Meagher “Meagher of the Sword,” hero of the Young Ireland Movement, the gallant Gael who had led the Irish Brigade into the teeth of hell through the cornfields of Antietam and up the cold slopes of Marye’s Heights above Fredericksburg. Now an impatient man in civilian clothes, his resignation had been moldering for four months in some War Department file. He wanted it back. Hat in hand he had come from New York to retrieve his commission as brigadier general with a promise to raise three thousand Irish to fight for the Stars and Stripes and for the green flag of Ireland-the mystic golden harp on the emerald green field.

President Lincoln had shown interest in his offer, and Meagher had come to Washington to see it through. Now he cooled his heels in the lobby of the War Department building as officers and clerks scurried about, stirred by the bloody riots in New York. Meagher was heartsick that his own people had raised their hands against their new country. He had argued again and again that the road to a new life in this country was to share its battles. And many had flocked to the colors. His own Irish Brigade, now death-shrunk through too many battles, had marched off full of enthusiasm a year ago. So much had soured since then. The Copperheads and the Democrats had seduced too many of his people to turn their backs on this country in its hour of peril. Too many had swallowed the lie that it was a nigger war to set the black man up above them. The Irish were not about to compete for last place. To many of them, coming to America had not been the choice of a new beginning, a bright future-it had been the simple choice to flee blighted Ireland or starve.

Churning this pool of bile were the Fenians, the secret society bent on the independence of Ireland and possessed of a primal hatred of England. They saw the war for the Union as a distraction from their goal of Irish independence. Some did see a value in military service-to train the exiled Irish to form an army and filibuster the conquest of Canada from an American base. As far-fetched as it seemed, the thought was to trade Canada for Ireland’s independence. Meagher had fashioned an argument that would allow a man to serve both the land of his birth and the land of his refuge. Freedom was his cause, suckled on Ireland’s green, but he was a generous friend to it everywhere else. He saw it as a duty for every liberty-loving man to fight for the preservation of the Union and freedom. The Irish would do best to fight alongside each other. “I hold that if only one in ten of us come back when this war is over, the military experience gained by that one will be of more service in a fight for Ireland’s freedom than would that of the entire ten as they are now.”⁸

No man had greater credentials and greater respect as an Irish patriot. He was cast in the mold of an Irish prince-proud, brave, gifted with the magic of words, and fey marked. He was also a gracious gentleman, with that extra touch of bearing that the Irish so admired in their leaders. In his bid for Ireland’s freedom, they had called him “Meagher of the Sword,” a title he treasured above all others. Ireland had made him a hero when his conspiracy to free Ireland was betrayed and he mocked the judge who held his life in his hand. Fame and exile to Australia followed. Greater fame fell on him in his daring escape that brought him to America.

However, he was also a man who could not see an endeavor through, and his soaring spirit all too often fell into a bottle when the heat of battle had cooled. His drunkenness had become more than a whisper. His resignation after Chancellorsville had been accepted with an all too obvious alacrity.

A clerk now interrupted his pacing. “I’m sorry, sir, but the Secretary is so pressed by business that he finds it impossible to set an appointment at this time.”

“But I have a letter from the President authorizing me to…”

“Yes, sir, many people have such letters, but Secretary Stanton has only so much time.”

Meagher’s hand tightened on his cane but relaxed when he recognized Charles Dana entering the lobby. Dana was Edwin Stanton’s assistant secretary of war. Meagher walked briskly to him, “Dana, so good to see you again.”

Dana was used to office seekers and politicians swarming around him, but Meagher was more than an annoyance. He was a presence, tall and thickset but graceful, with a shock of fine brown hair, penetrating green eyes, and the coiled power of a wolfhound. “Well, hello, Meagher. What brings you to Washington?” It was a question he instantly regretted.

Meagher poured out his distress. Dana took him by the arm into his office. “I’ll not hide it from you, Meagher, but the Irish are in a bad odor at this time. The government wonders if the Irish can be trusted now.”

“Trusted? By God, sir, that question was not asked on all the blood-soaked fields my brigade fought upon.”

“The riots in New York were Irish-led; we can deal with only one rebellion at a time. If you want to be of service, wean your people away from the disloyal elements that have them in such thrall. Then we can talk of another Irish brigade. Right now Stanton will not hear of it.”

Stanton was trying to make sure Lincoln heard no more of it either, but later the President brought the subject up again and asked how Meagher was doing. Stanton huffed that the Irishman had lost interest. Lincoln was surprised and replied, “Did you ever know an Irishman who would decline an office, or refuse a pair of epaulets, or do anything but fight gallantly after them?”

USS NANSEMOND AT SEA OFF WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA, 10:15 AM, AUGUST 1, 1863

The lookout in the crow’s nest shouted out, “Ahoy! Black smoke to the southwest!” Battle stations sounded, scattering men to their posts. The engines pulsed with heaps of coal-fired energy as the Nansemond turned after its prey.

She had been built just the year before as a side-wheel steamer of four hundred tons and named the James Freeborn and taken into service as a blockade ship. Her speed of almost fifteen knots was enormous but necessary if the Navy was to intercept the even fleeter blockade-runners being built in Britain. She had taken the name of Nansemond, the James River tributary of that name, to honor the intrepid successes her new commander had won on that river. This twenty-five-year-old naval prodigy, Lt. Roswell Hawks Lamson, had been second in the Annapolis class of 1862. Under his hands, she raced through the waves.

It was a rare navy that would allow one so young to trod his own quarterdeck as captain, but national crisis brought out talent, and Lamson’s hard fighting on the Virginia rivers had delighted the old admirals. They could not reward him fast enough for the qualities that were a premium in this grinding war against a resourceful and valiant foe. They called his skill “Lamson’s Luck,” though “luck” was not the half of it.

He was commanding a gunboat squadron on the Nansemond River in late April during the Suffolk campaign. Lt. Gen. James Longstreet and his 1st Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia had been sent there to counter an expected Union offensive fueled by reinforcements. When the reinforcements were sent elsewhere, he converted his defensive mission to an offensive one to cut the communications of the twenty thousand Union troops in the Suffolk area. He had to cross the Nansemond to do it. On the morning of April 14, Lamson was taking the USS Mount Washington down the river to Suffolk when he was engaged by a Confederate battery at Norleet’s Point. The first enemy salvo blew up his boilers, and the ship began to drift ashore under heavy fire. Another of his vessels pulled him off the shore, only to ground the Mount Washington in crossing the bar. Another ten pieces of enemy artillery and hundreds of riflemen opened up at 11:00 AM. He fought them from his stationary position on the bar until 6:00 PM. He reported later thather boilers, cylinders, and steel drums pierced and ten shells went through the smoke pipe, and the rest of the machinery much damaged. Her pilot house riddled, wheelropes shot away, and her decks and bulwarks completely splintered, everyone who has seen her says there has not been another vessel so shot to pieces during the war. The flag-staff was shot away, and when the flag fell into the water, the rebs cheered exultingly; but they did not enjoy it for long before we had the dear old stars and stripes waving over us again, with everyone more determined than ever to fight them to the last timber of the vessel.

Followed by a master’s mate and seaman, Lamson climbed through the wreckage to the upper deck. They hauled up the flagstaff by the ensign halyards, raised and lashed it to the stump. He considered it a miracle that they all survived unscathed, only one of many miracles that seemed to fall on that ship amid the rebel shot and shell. “After the action was over, the sailors gathered around me on the deck, took hold of my hands and arms, threw their arms around me, and I saw tears starting from eyes that had looked the rebel battery in the face unflinchingly.”

The enemy had fared far worse. Ten of its guns had been smashed, and hundreds of the sharpshooters had been killed or wounded by the guns of the Mount Washington. More important, because of Lamson, Longstreet did not cross the Nansemond to fall like a wolf among the second-rate Union generals who cowered in fear of him. Lamson’s courage had stopped his plan dead in its tracks. With men like Lamson on the river, Longstreet would not chance the move.

The Secretary of the Navy wrote that the Service “is proud to see in the younger members of the corps such evidence of energy and gallantry, and execution and ability as scarcely surpassed by those of more age and experience.”¹² The Nansemond was Lamson’s reward. He fitted her out himself at the Baltimore Navy Yard but was only able to find a small part of his needed crew, though they were the pick. When he reached the flagship of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, the large frigate Minnesota, he asked the captain for permission to recruit the men who had served with him on the Mount Washington. When he went to fetch them, half the frigate’s crew begged to be included. He took fifty, “as true blue jacket as ever walked a deck, and ten officers.” A hundred officers had applied for his ship. His executive, Benjamin Porter, was a treasure.

The Nansemond was as trim and well run as any ship that flew the Stars and Stripes, all shipshape and Bristol fashion, as the petty officers said. The old salts had already taken the measure of this young man and threw the weight of their goodwill on his side and set the tone for the ship. They whispered that he was Davy Farragut all over again and for good reason-he was Navy through and through. Lamson knew his job and everyone else’s. He was a teacher, vital in a navy that had ballooned from five thousand to fifty thousand men in two years. It did not take long for the word to spread that the Nansemond was a hale ship with a lucky captain who plucked fat prizes off the sea.

A good-looking but not striking young man, with his carefully combed and slicked-down black hair, Lamson looked younger than his years-something he did not appreciate when a captain’s maturity was a given attribute of his ability. He grew a mustache and a goatee to make him appear older. Officers and men did not seem to care. There was something about him that compelled a willing obedience, something hard to put your finger on. It went beyond his considerable competence. His presence seemed to generate a certain excitement in others who wanted to be around him. He was like an electric current that caused others to glow. He was also a fighter, and men follow such a man.

He was also lovesick. Every mail packet would carry a handful of his letters to his cousin and fiancée, Kate Buckingham. The ahoy had found him at his writing desk, where he had just had time to write, “Dear Kate, Again the Nansemond is dashing through the water, and Again on the deck I stand Of my own swift gliding craft”¹³ before leaping through his cabin door and racing up the gangway to his quarterdeck.

Porter handed him the eyeglass. “The vessel is running offshore, a blockade-runner for sure.”

“Let’s give chase, Mr. Porter. Stand to intercept. We shall see what our new engines can do.”

The Nansemond leaped through the sea like a hunting dog on the scent. By noon, she had gained so much on the vessel that Lamson opened fire on the chase, and the shots fell just short. The sextant reading told him they were gaining, when a strong breeze from the southwest came up to whip the sea into heavy swells. The Nansemond slowed as the waves struck under her low guards, but the quarry suffered the same handicap as well. Lamson pressed on, straining his engines to close the distance. The next two hours saw him gain. The pursued began to throw cargo overboard to lighten its load, but the Nansemond continued to close until 3:50 PM when a shot from her bow gun shattered the vessel’s figurehead. The vessel came about to signal her surrender.

She was the Margaret and Jesse, seven hundred tons, registered in Charleston and bound for Wilmington from Nassau. Lamson sent two officers aboard to hoist the American flag. With a prize crew in control of the captured vessel, Lamson cut a course for the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron off Wilmington, and when everything was secure and under way, he returned to his cabin and picked up his pen to finish his letter to the fair Kate.

The next morning in the early light the ships swung in among the squadron. Lamson, at his breakfast, was interrupted by a knock on the cabin door. “Enter,” he said.

A tiny cabin boy, all of eleven years old, stood owl-eyed for few seconds until he blurted out, “Mr. Porter’s compliments, sir. Flagship signaling.”

Lamson put his breakfast aside and went topside, nodding at Mr. Porter as he scanned the squadron bobbing in the sea. Most were converted merchantships like the Nansemond, meant to run down blockade-runners. There was also a handful of the purpose-built, prewar, steam-driven warships. As powerful as the squadron was, Lamson knew its strength paled compared to that assembled under Adm. John Dahlgren’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron off Charleston. Admiral Dahlgren had command of the Navy’s new iron fist, all eight of the new iron monitors. Riding low in the water with their great double-gunned turrets, the Passaic class monitors were a marvel rushed to production after last year’s great duel on in Hampton Roads between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, but not a one of these wonders bobbed here off Wilmington.

“What is the signal, Mr. Henderson?” Lamson asked the acting ensign. He had been lagging in his signal recognition skills, and Lamson had had him at practice in every spare moment.

Henderson blinked, read the signal flags, and then said quickly, “‘Captain Nansemond report squadron commander immediately,’ sir.”

“Very good, Mr. Henderson.”

INDIANAPOLIS RAIL YARDS, INDIANA, 3:22 AM, AUGUST 3, 1863

“Traitor!” The speaker spat out the word, a letter clutched in his hand. But it was his eyes that glowed with hate. Big Jim Smoke was a hater by nature, but now he had a cause.

The Copperhead rebellion could not succeed by merely hamstringing the war effort-it must succeed by an act as overt as the rebels firing on Fort Sumter, and for that they needed arms. Tens of thousands of small arms and tons of ammunition were siphoned off the open market to fill secret arsenals, but even that was not enough. Raids on federal arms warehouses followed.

Such as the one on this warm summer’s night.

Their target was the arms warehouse, one of many that fed the rail yards of Indianapolis, which poured arms and supplies south to the armies that had finally starved out proud and obdurate Vicksburg. Thirty men slid through the shadows. Wagons waited deeper in the gloom. Two o’clock in the morning is a dangerous time for sentries and in particular for these men who were members of the Invalid Corps, the light duty men released from the charnel house hospitals as unfit for field duty but able to do some valuable service. In these early hours a man could be seduced into the sleepy arms of Orpheus. It was burden enough to nurse a limping leg from a minié ball at Chancellorsville or Champion Hill without struggling also against leaden sleep.

The man with the letter had tucked it and his anger away. He had work to do but had to wait while others did their own work. He stepped around a corner to be out of sight and lit a match to his cigar. The guards did not stir from their sleep as shadowy forms scurried through the lamplight. A few practiced motions, and the guards slumped to the ground, cut throats gushing black blood in the pale light. The wide double doors swung open with a creak, and the gang rushed in. A lamp waved back and forth down the street to summon the wagons.

“You see,” Big Jim Smoke said to the young man who had joined him, “how easy it is.” Felix Stidger’s handsome, pale face had not even twitched when the guards were killed. Calm, self-control was the shield and buckler of a good spy, and Stidger was among the best. An ardent Unionist, Stidger had enlisted and served in the office of the Provost Marshal General of Tennessee. He had volunteered to infiltrate the Copperhead organization in Indiana and had succeeded beyond his wildest hopes. With great charm he had ingratiated himself so well with Dr. Bowles that he had been appointed the group’s corresponding secretary, and the information flowed to Washington. Now, though, beneath that placid exterior he was worried. Big Jim and his gang should have been caught in a trap.

Big Jim instead reached into his pocket and pulled out the letter. “Looking for this?” he sneered. Stidger’s eyes widened only a bit as he heard Smoke’s pistol cock and felt the muzzle stab into his belly. “You, of all people, should have known that we are everywhere, even the post office. And you mailing so many letters, and the Army making so many raids on our hidden weapons and making so many arrests.” He pressed the muzzle deeper into Stidger’s belly. “And now, if you please, we find this one, telling about this little raid of ours.” He grinned, his incisors gleaming in the lamplight, wet and wolf-like through his beard. He gave the muzzle another shove. “What gets me is how you got Bowles to trust you. But then he is too much the trusting fool. From the first, you weren’t right by me.”

“Come to your senses, Big Jim.” Stidger’s voice was about as even as Smoke had ever heard. “Of course, I wrote it. They think I work for them, and I give them just enough truth to make me believable. I am working under Vallandingham’s instructions.” Smoke was listening, he could tell. He had captured his attention by dropping the biggest name in the Copperhead movement. Now he had only to play it out and make him doubt. “Look at the date, man. I wrote that the raid would be on the twelfth not the second. Check it.” Stidger was counting on the split second distraction for Big Jim to look at the letter again in which to draw his own pistol. Instead, Big Jim pulled his trigger. The bullet’s sound muffled in the young man’s middle. It severed his spine as it spewed blood and bone out behind him in fiery tongue, and he fell like a rag doll.

“Good try, traitor. But if you had meant the twelfth, you should not have written the second.” The light had not entirely gone out of Stidger’s eyes when Big Jim kicked him in the face. He paused long enough to wipe his bloody shoes on the corpse and then crossed the street. By then, most of the five thousand new Springfield rifles had been loaded into the waiting wagons and were disappearing into the gloom.

OFF CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, 2:15 PM, AUGUST 5, 1863

The greatest of the great white sharks made the cold waters off the Cape of Good Hope their home. These primal killing machines now had competition from an even deadlier killing machine, man. The CSS Alabama was an iron-hulled steamer, 220 feet long and 32 feet across her beam, three-masted, and bark-rigged with powerful engines that sent her sleek hull through the water at thirteen knots. Six gun ports pierced each side. She was circling her helpless forty-fifth victim, a small Yankee bark, Sea Bride, close inshore. The entire population of Cape Town had decamped to the shore to watch the spectacle of death on the water. A reporter for the Cape Argus described the hunt.The Yankee came around from the southeast, and about five miles from the Bay, the steamer came down upon her. The Yankee was evidently taken by surprise.Like a cat, watching and playing with a victimized mouse, Captain Semmes permitted his prize to draw off a few yards, and then he upped steam again and pounced upon her. She first sailed around the Yankee from stem to stern, and stern to stem again. The way that fine, saucy, rakish craft was handled was worth riding a hundred miles to see. She went around the bark like a toy, making a complete circle, and leaving an even margin of water between herself and her prize.¹⁴

There was more than a little glee mixed in with the excitement. The sentiment in this colony of the British Empire, on which the sun never set, reflected the mother country’s political prejudices as closely as they parroted the latest fashions-contempt for the Yankees and admiration for the Confederates. Cape Town’s elite was already in competition to invite the Alabama’s captain, the famous Capt. Raphael Semmes, into their homes. To the rage of the U.S. consul, the city prepared to fete the captain and his officers even before the Alabama had made its kill.

The Confederate commerce raider finished toying with its prey and sent over a boat to fetch its captain and his sailing papers. The defeated captain climbed aboard stone-faced, his life in ruins. He owned his ship; it was his home as well as his livelihood. Semmes greeted him cordially before reviewing his papers. The Sea Bride’s captain observed him as he read. Semmes was a thin, wiry man, all sinew and determination. His already famous waxed mustache protruded at right angles for three inches from either side of his face.

Semmes looked up. “I declare the Sea Bride a prize of war, Captain. I will send a prize crew to take her. You and your crew I will land in Cape Town.” The man held no hope of escape; his manifest clearly declared his cargo of machinery to be the property of American merchants. What sickened him though was the thought that Semmes might burn her, his home of so many years, as the captain of the Alabama had done to so many whalers. Their oil-soaked timbers had created vertical infernos floating on the sea, visible for great distances, and had become a specter haunting every American ship’s captain. The Alabama had hunted for less than a year, and already she had spread terror through the American shipping world, driving insurance rates skyward and giving owners no alternative but to reflag, sell their ships to foreign owners, or face ruin at sea. Bit by bit, Semmes was breaking Yankee commerce on the high seas.

The world was already putting the praise of the Alabama to song in a dozen languages. As Semmes sailed into Cape Town Harbor, the locals were already singing in Afrikaans, “Daar kom die Alabama, die Alabama kom oor die see.” It would become a local legend that would endure for more than one hundred years.