Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War

10

FORT GORGES, PORTLAND HARBOR, MAINE, 2:00 AM, SEPTEMBER 30, 1863

The British sailors pulled slowly on their muffled oars through the fog. They had left the iron screw troopship HMS Dromedary some distance back. In the boats between the oarsmen sat Royal Marines, still and silent. In their blue greatcoats and shakos and with the Enfield rifles in their hands, they could easily be mistaken for American troops, especially in the thick fog.

A light, wan and struggling against the fog, appeared ahead. A clutch of guards, wrapped in their own greatcoats against the chill and huddling against a fire in an iron basket, could be made out under it. At last one cried out, “Who goes there?”

“Garrison relief,” answered a voice in a good New England accent.

“Come in, then,” answered the guard. Capt. George Bazalgette, the officer of Marines, sighed in quiet relief. They had surprise on their side. He silently thanked Providence that the worsening situation had snatched him out of the back-of-beyond station on San Juan Island on the Pacific coast south of Vancouver after the aborted confrontation between Britain and the United States dubbed “the Pig War.” An assignment like this was bound to ensure that he was not remembered as the officer who almost fought in the Pig War.

The plan had relied on the laxness of the Maine home guards who provided the garrison of the fort on rotation. The huge fort appeared as a shadowy mass in the fog. The officer had seen it before on a special visit he had made in mufti a week before. Build on a man-made island on Hog Island Ledge, it was a granite-built, six-sided fort with two tiers of casemates, designed for 195 guns, at least half of which had been installed.

The first boat came up to the stone pier. The guards looked on in curiosity as the officer stepped out followed by his men. Bazalgette’s pistol appeared in the face of the sergeant of the guard as his men quickly overpowered the guards. More boats began unloading Marines. One of them carried a team of Army sappers who rushed along the stone pier to the thick iron-reinforced oak door of the main gate. They were planting their explosive charge when the small access door in the larger doors opened and an officer stepped out followed by the guard relief. The three sappers reacted quickly and bayoneted two of the guards. The officer, bolder and more quick witted than would be expected at two in the morning, pulled his pistol and shot two of the sappers. The third sapper killed the officer with a single cleaving blow of the engineer’s heavy bayonet and bolted through the open door. Another shot came from within. Bazalgette came running, followed by the fifty men who had disembarked. He saw the open door. Another shot from within echoed. He jumped over the bodies and rushed through to find two dead men on the floor and the sapper struggling with a third. A Marine rushed past to plunge his bayonet into the guard. Other men unbolted the great gate doors and pushed back the leaves. The Marines poured in.

Bazalgette and the Army sappers had carefully studied the plans of the fort that had come his way courtesy of Lieutenant Colonel Wolseley. Armed with this knowledge, the Marines fanned out through the fort as more ships’ boats unloaded the rest of the three hundred-man battalion assault force assembled from the ships of Admiral Milne’s command at Halifax. The shots had started to rouse the garrison, but sleepy, inexperienced men on a foggy night were no match for Royal Marines. Men stumbling out of their barracks were shot down or bayoneted. The Marines stormed inside. In less than a half hour, Fort Gorges had fallen. In the morning the good people of Portland would see British colors flying from it as the Royal Navy entered the port in force. The greatest port in northern New England had all but fallen. The most careful intelligence had reported that the only troops in Portland were the home guard garrisons of the harbor forts. It would all be a matter of formalities.

ST. JOHNS RAILROAD STATION, QUEBEC, CANADA, 2:00 AM, SEPTEMBER 30, 1863

For the last two days and nights, the Grand Trunk Railway in Canada had been filled with troop trains converging on Montreal, the nexus of the railway’s connections with New York and New England. From the ancient site of royal France, the might of the British Empire was marshaling rapidly. Most of the forces that had been ostentatiously concentrating between Detroit and Buffalo entrained at night and sped east. The remainder, reinforced by the mobilization of the Sedentary Militia, had occupied the fortifications on the Canadian side. From Montreal the troop trains went south toward the New York and Vermont borders. Just south of St. Johns, the Grand Trunk Railway split to travel on both sides of Lake Champlain and then reunite south of the lake straight down to Albany. From there both Boston and New York City were a bare hundred miles away. Another force of regulars and Canadian Volunteers had concentrated east of Montreal at Sherbrooke along the Grand Trunk and struck southeast through the sleepy small towns of upper Vermont and Maine toward Portland.

Wolseley walked the platform at the railroad station as the troop trains sped through south. Already the lead elements of the invasion of New York had crossed the border and seized the first American stations, brushing aside the militia units that had been called up a few days before and cutting the telegraph wires. With the railroad in British hands the invasion forces eschewed the roads and sped south by rail through the night. This time the red-coated regiments ensured that no one would be riding ahead to alert the country that the British were coming. Washington’s eyes had been on Detroit and Buffalo, just as Wolseley had planned. The divisions they had sent north were defending borders the British had no intention of attacking. Militia and home guard units had been deemed sufficient for less threatened areas, the very places the British invasion force was pouring through as fast as their trains would take them. A few Maine regiments were to return home to recruit, he learned in the last week, but they would be dispersed across the state and of little military value.

There were any number of British generals and full colonels leading their men in the first invasion of the United States since 1813, but it was Lt. Col. Garnet Wolseley who had been the brain and energy behind the plan they were executing. Wrapped in his greatcoat against the deep chill of an early Canadian fall, he expounded to the eager clutch of staff officers around him. “We will strike Brother Jonathan so hard that it will drive any thought of attacking Canada right out of his head.” It was exciting to be a part of the exercise of England’s might against an upstart power, but in the presence of a true charismatic leader, the experience was intoxicating. Wolseley went on, more to fill the time than to elucidate. All he could do now was to wait for the first reports of the execution of his plan to deliver such a blow that Union morale would crack wide open.

He continued, “By seizing Albany and Portland we accomplish four essential objectives. First, we are too weak to defend, so we must attack. They cannot threaten Canada if they are threatened in their heartland. Second, by seizing Albany, the capital of New York, we disrupt the richest and most powerful of their states and threaten their greatest port. Third, by seizing Portland and the rest of Maine, we eliminate a geographical salient between Canada and the Maritimes, detach an entire state from the Union, and add it as a buffer to the Maritimes. Fourth, at the same time we acquire the use of another first-rate port south of overburdened Halifax from which the Royal Navy can base its blockade.” He struck his fist into his open palm, letting the pop of cold leather on leather punctuate his exposition. “Gentlemen, we are on the verge of the greatest war to take place in our time. Mark me-it will dwarf the Crimea and the Sepoy Mutiny. For those of you who think promotion slow, your troubles are about to end.

“There’s another thing, gentlemen. You will find man shooting is the finest sport of all; there is a certain amount of infatuation about it, that the more you kill the more you wish to kill.”⁶

Privately he admitted that they would have “toughish work of it.” The Americans would not be an easy victory. They had too much experience after two and half years of war, and they were not shy about fighting vast, bloody battles. That was why audacity had to be thrown in the scales to redress British America’s geographical vulnerability. Audacity, yes, aided by indirection. The Americans must be so distracted by fires at the back of the house that they would not be able to give full attention to his breaking down their front door.

As to the front door, so audacious a plan could never have been attempted if the invasion had been on foot and horse. It would take a week of unopposed marching to reach either objective. The use of trains in the offensive had never been tried before. Trains had been used to rapidly move armies to their staging areas but never as the spearhead of invasion itself. It was the only way to deliver a knockout punch. If the element of surprise was maintained, a very big “if” indeed, then they would seize both cities by the next day. If not, they would detrain where necessary and press on by road. Maj. Gen. Lord Frederick Paulet had been given command of the twenty thousand men of the two mixed British-Canadian divisions, designated the Albany Field Force, that would strike for New York’s capital. The Guards Brigade was in the lead trains heading south to Albany. They had to be given pride of place in this operation. While the guards had burnished their battle honors in the Crimean War, they were not known for their dash or the quick thinking of their officers. Wolseley would have been happier with some of the scrappier line regiments with less social standing in the lead.

Those regiments were heading toward Portland.

CHATHAM ARCH, INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA, 3:00 AM, SEPTEMBER 30, 1863

George Grenfell adjusted his cap in the mirror and took a moment to reflect how far he had come since he had set off for a life of adventure. His thoughts fled back to his days in the Moroccan Rif when the bloom of youth was on him. Now his hair was white, but he told himself, “Damned distinguished. Life’s not done with me yet.”

John Hines was not so reflective. The wiry, little man had already put on his uniform and not once glanced in the mirror. He was spinning the cylinder on his pistol to make sure its action was still smooth. He spared a glance to Grenfell. “I swear, sir, you look the dandy, but find the time to admire yourself when we don’t have a fight to start.”

Grenfell just smiled and ran his fingers under his fine, white mustache. “Now, Captain, you must allow yourself to savor a splendid moment. You never know when it will be your last.”

“I’ll do that when the war is over.”

Grenfell did not reply that too many men never lived that long.

There was a knock on the door. They stopped still and glanced at each other and then toward the door. The last ten days had made them wary. That damned Major Cline and his band had dogged their heels far too closely. At times they despaired that their plan would disintegrate as Cline picked apart the pieces. Had he done so already? They had escaped him only by a hair on more than one occasion.

Another knock followed by a muffled, insistent voice. “We’re ready.” Hines relaxed. Even through the door, he recognized Jim Smoke’s rasping voice. Hines let him in, and immediately the room filled with the big man’s menace. “We’re ready,” he said again. “My men are all in place.” Two hundred Copperheads were lying in wait around Camp Morton, the sprawling Confederate prisoner of war facility on what had been planned as Indianapolis’s fair grounds before the war. Three thousand veteran soldiers of the Confederacy were sleeping inside, or so their guards thought. Word had come to them just hours before to be awake and alert this night. Not that the guards would have picked up anything out the ordinary. The experienced regiment that had been the camp’s guard force had been transferred a week ago, their place taken by volunteer home guards. The new men were profoundly unaware of their duties.

UNION STATION, PORTLAND, MAINE, 4:10 AM, SEPTEMBER 30, 1863

The city of Portland sits on a boot-shaped peninsula with the toe pointing northeast to the broad Casco Bay, sheltered from the Atlantic by a string of islands. Its harbor lay on the southern, or under side of the boot and made Portland one of the finest deep-water ports on the East Coast. The instep and big toe curled around Back Cove. The Fore River ran down the back of the foot and past the heel into the harbor. The town of some forty thousand souls occupied the peninsula from the toe to the heel. The Grand Trunk Railroad ran north to south down the western edge of the boot and curled east along the harbor to pass through the city’s Union Station and then ran north to Canada again. Most Maine men remembered the cool green lushness of the city whose every street but the smallest was lined with stately chestnuts and maples, earning Portland the title of the “Forest City.”

For the Maine men arriving from the Army of the Potomac, the station meant hot food and coffee on a chilly morning from the attentive ladies of the Sanitary Commission who maintained a permanent facility to attend to military personnel in transit. Portland was not on a main troop transit route and the facility was small, but the people of Portland had turned the entire train station into a reception center for their heroes home to rest and recruit back their strength. Since midnight the trains had been arriving, not with a few Maine regiments but with Maine’s entire military contingent from the Army of the Potomac. Sharpe’s suggestion had started the ball rolling, and that ball had rolled right over Major General Meade’s loud protest to lose all his Maine regiments-3,241 men divided into one cavalry, ten infantry regiments, and three artillery batteries. Maine had taken 3,721 men into the battle of Gettysburg and lost 1,017. Since then hundreds of wounded and missing had returned to duty, but most of the regiments had been severely depleted even before Gettysburg. Had they been at full strength, the entire contingent would have numbered almost thirteen thousand men. It was an example of what wastage the Army had suffered in camp and in the field and of the failure to establish a regular replacement system.

Thus the story that they were returning home to recruit was entirely plausible. As a cover story, the public announcement had indicated only three regiments were returning. The governor had only been informed of the true extent of the troop movement the day before. The ladies of the Sanitary Commission had had to scramble, but when the trains began to arrive, they were ready with tables piled high with food and enough hot coffee to float a monitor.

The trains had begun to arrive strangely enough about two hours before the Royal Marines had climbed into their boats to fall upon Fort Gorges. The train ride from Northern Virginia had been hurried, almost nonstop, but the men took the discomfort in stride as every uninterrupted mile took them closer to home. They had not bothered to ask why two brigade staffs had been attached to them, so intent were they for home. The gunners had brought their complete batteries to include horses, guns, limbers, and caissons as well as their supply and maintenance wagons. The cavalry had brought their horses as well. That raised questions, but they had been told there would be major parades in Portland, Augusta, and Bangor, and the idea of showing off to the local girls had disarmed any further curiosity. What no one bothered to note were the medical and supply units because they occupied the rearmost trains. It was an efficient logistical exercise, an area in which the Union excelled. It was also a clever strategic deception plan in operation. That was something the Union was now just beginning to excel at under the shadowy hand of Brigadier General Sharpe.

Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, of Gettysburg reknown, had been instructed to accompany the Maine contingent and assume “administrative” control of five infantry regiments, including his old 20th Maine and a battery. The other five regiments and another battery had been similarly brigaded under another able Maine officer, Col. Ephraim Harper. Another battery and a cavalry regiment rounded out the Maine units. Chamberlain and Harper had been briefed on their mission before leaving Washington along with Brig. Gen. Neal Dow. Known as a temperance fanatic, “the Napoleon of Temperance” was a brave man withal. People had not forgotten the heavy hand with which he had put down the Portland Rum Riot of 1855 during his time as mayor. Chamberlain and Harper winced when Halleck explained that in case of war, Dow would assume command of the “Maine Division” with the mission of defending the state and cutting the New Brunswick Road to sever communications between Canada and the Maritimes. Nobody liked Dow, which is not necessarily a requirement for successful command, but his constant emphasis on temperance was bound to alienate the troops. The men were aware that Dow had ordered his own 13th Maine to sign the temperance pledge. It was not something Chamberlain would have tried with his own 20th Maine despite the men’s affection for him.

Since Little Round Top, Chamberlain had become something of a legend not only in the Army of the Potomac but also in Maine, where he was now the shining hero. That desperate bayonet charge downhill that had swept the 15th Alabama away had swept him up to glory. Command of a brigade had followed, and he was among those few identified for stars in the future. A gifted college professor who had abandoned the classroom for the camp to serve his country in this great struggle for freedom, he had truly found himself in the Army. Inside that mild-mannered bookworm was a fighting man whom other men rushed to follow. Campaigning had worked the softness of academe out of him and replaced it with a lean, almost leopard-like presence. The sun had bleached his blond hair even fairer, and his drooping mustache set off his long face with its penetrating blue eyes. He was the natural warrior with an innate sense of Mars’s three gifts of the art of war-”quick grasp, speed, and shock.”

Word had spread of the arrival of the troops, and thousands of townspeople had left their warm beds to greet friends and relatives. Hundreds of lanterns were bouncing through the fog that drifted up from the harbor to gather around the station whose own lights were struggling with the wet, floating gloom. Inside the station, the men were finishing their meals. Dow was conferring with Chamberlain and Harper when a familiar, whistling noise stopped every mouth. The shell crashed through the roof and exploded among the dining tables, scattering blue-clad bodies every which way and killing three Sanitation Commission ladies carrying coffee and doughnuts. More shells followed, turning the main hall into a shambles as the troops and civilians rushed for the exits, but they found no safety. More shells were falling into the crowd, which had turned into a terrified beast, screaming in fear.

With Fort Gorges fallen, British ships had crept slowly into the harbor, drawn by the dull glow of light at the railroad station. His Copperhead informant had told the squadron commander aboard the frigate HMS Bacchante that the glow was the railroad station on the edge of the city. The officer ordered his shell guns to fire on the center of the glow. HMS Diadem followed with its own broadside battery. Here was an economic target important to the ability of the Americans to make war, he thought, disregarding Admiral Milne’s instructions not to fire on coastal towns. For this he would be relieved, but not before his 8-inch shells piled the bodies of women and children up in the station and surrounding streets and gave the Americans an immortal battle cry-“Remember Maine!”

Temperance fanatic notwithstanding, Dow was quick witted and decisive in an emergency and ordered Harper to assemble and double-time his regiments to the docks to repel any possible landing. If they were close enough to bombard Union Station that meant they had bypassed or seized the harbor forts. He instructed Chamberlain to hold his regiments in reserve and ensure that the trains were speedily unloaded to support combat. The gunners and the cavalry did not wait to be told; these were veteran troops and were already unloading their equipment and horses. The infantry regiments were equally in hand as soon as they had evacuated the now burning wooden station house. The smoke from that inferno mixed with the thick fog to wrap the city in a blur. The men of Harper’s regiments moved easily through the streets of the city that was the hometown of many, their tread propelled by a deepening anger. Frightened night watchmen from the docks intercepted the columns and directed them to Smith’s Wharf, where hundreds of the “Peacemakers” from the 1/16th Foot from the Halifax garrison were hustling down the gangplanks from the Dromedary onto its broad surface with its double rail lines. Wolseley’s reconnaissance had picked the best landing spot. Light boat guns with their Royal Marine crews rolled down the gangways to clack with their iron wheels over the granite paving of the wharf. Boats from the bombarding ships carrying detachments of armed naval ratings clustered along the edge of the wharf, adding men in white and blue to the crimson mass moving down the wharf.

Lt. Col. Charles Langely, commanding the Peacemakers, was more than anxious after the Navy had started a bonfire whose dull red eye glowed even through this horrendous fog. The essence of a coup de main is stealth and silence, and now they had neither. He had hoped to be in control of the city as it woke to the morning and present its citizens with an accomplished fact that common sense would force them to accept. Now, thanks to the Navy, all would be chaos. He could not see but could hear the Dromedary pulling away from the wharf to pick up the Royal Marines at Ft. Gorges as a further reinforcement for Langely’s command. “Thank God,” he murmured to himself. “There are almost no troops in the town.”

There were only 112 men left in the 3rd Maine after it had watered the fields of Pennsylvania with its blood, but they double-timed up York Street as if they were the full thousand men that had left home two years ago. They turned right on Maple and crossed Commercial Street, which put them on the edge of the docks between Deakes and Brown’s wharves. Even through the fog, the activity could be sensed and heard more than seen. The colonel stopped them only long enough to fix bayonets. The watchmen lifted their lanterns and pointed down the street to Smith’s Wharf. Then he led them forward. Shots rent the fog; the colonel fell, but the 3rd Maine kept moving. Shouts in British English cut through the night. More shots came and more men pitched into the gutter. When a picket line emerged from the fog, too close to run, too few could survive the moving blue column that stabbed with bayonets and struck with rifle butts. The column broke onto the Smith’s Wharf as the British firing line cut loose. The first blue ranks fell, but the rest broke into a run over the short space and closed with the Peacemakers before they could reload. Now it was man to man. The gunpowder and technological revolutions of the time disappeared as men fell into the ultimate savagery with bayonets and rifle butts, teeth and bare hands.

More companies of the 1/16th rushed into the fight as they clambered onto the wharf while the 4th and 5th Maine pushed in from the town. Soon the entire fog-blanketed wharf was a seething mass of fighting men with so little room that only pistols were of any use. There was no time or space to reload a rifle. Once fired, it became a spear.

There were no tougher professionals in that age than the British infantry, but even their toughness was no match for the veteran courage and rage of the Maine men, whose homes had been violated and their women and children murdered. The outnumbered redcoats were being pushed back down the wharf as bodies carpeted the planking or fell off the sides into the water. Lieutenant Colonel Langely’s body was among them as it slipped beneath the murky harbor water. He would become a legend in the history of the regiment, likened to Horatio at the bridge. No Army but that of the British can wring so much glory and inspiration from a death. With two bayonet men on either side, he had fought in the front rank with rifle and bayonet, prodigiously lethal in his own right. There was very little scope to command with men packed so tightly on a narrow front. At that moment, an example was all the command his men had needed. He had finally gone down in that blur of bayonets and crack of pistols as the Maine men shoved them back and back again.

The rear American companies peeled off left and right to fire into the enemy on the wharf. They were joined by the 5th Maine Battery, which sent canister into the British and into the boats clustered at the end of the wharf. A British corvette, HMS Pylades, steamed up to fire into the struggling mass but killed as many of its men as the Americans it cut down. The battery turned its guns on the ship, sweeping the decks this time with case shot, killing the captain and helmsmen, and leaving its upper decks a splintered shambles.

The Peacemakers, mixed with naval ratings and Marines, were backed down the wharf, step by step, begrudging every bloody inch until the last of them were clustered at the end of the wharf as dawn began to burn off the last of the thinning fog. The corvette had drifted away, its engines now holed by a solid shot from the battery. Three hundred fifty-three were left of the nine hundred British who had set foot on the dock. Their backs to the water, the Dromedary gone, and their boats smashed, they fought on. Suddenly the fighting stopped. Both groups just stood there on the planking strewn with dead and dying men, mingled equally in Union blue and Her Majesty’s crimson. Ten feet of silence separated the panting, blood- and sweat-soaked groups. The inner fires banked. An officer in blue stepped forward and demanded their surrender. A sergeant in red threw down his rifle, for there was not an officer on his feet; then the others followed. But the battle for Portland had only just begun.

CAMP MORTON, INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA, 4:15 AM, SEPTEMBER 30, 1863

Two hours before dawn when most of the guards at Camp Morton slept, the three thousand men inside the prisoners’ barracks were awake. The word had gone out after midnight to rouse the men in silence. In the officers’ section of the camp, John Hunt Morgan waited more intently than any of them. It was to him that Hines had sent word. He had shared it with only three of his officers, but at his command the camp had quietly stirred itself. He would have taken heart in these early hours suspended between night and day when courage is weakest if he had known that of the thousands of expectantly waiting men there was one who had clutched a camp-made battle flag, the square-shaped stars and bars, that he had painstakingly assembled from what bits and pieces of colored cloth had come his way. Such flags, “the damned red flags of rebellion,” had quailed many a Northern heart in the past. This one was waiting to do so again.

A prisoner of war camp is designed to keep people inside; the eyes of the warders are focused inward and not outward. Of all the three hundred guards, only two had their eyes on the countryside outside the camp. They had not been under military discipline long and had not acquired a healthy fear of falling asleep at their posts. They did not notice the column of men shuffling along the empty road that led past the outskirts of Indianapolis to the camp. It was a great shame. They were missing an artful demonstration of military deception. A few men in Union blue rode at the head of the column of shabbily dressed men and a few more walked along the column with bayoneted rifles. At the rear rumbled six wagons.

Had the camp’s guards been awake, they would have seen a detachment of new prisoners under guard. The column came to a halt in front of the gate. Their breath rose in little clouds in the chill air. Big Jim looked down and smiled like a wolf. The country boy guards were soundly in the arms of Orpheus. As Jim was shaking his head, two of the guards in the column brought two prisoners forward, wrapped in blankets. They too, for an incredulous moment, stared at the sleeping guards in the light of the single lamp hanging from the guard post. Grenfell snickered, “We really must commend the sergeant of the guard after this.”

Smoke had dismounted. He walked over to the first guard and brought down his pistol butt on the first guard’s head. As the man slumped to the ground, he struck the other. The man staggered back, awakened by the glancing blow, but Smoke was on him, striking again and again, the blood spattering the wall until he stood over the bludgeoned corpse and signaled the others forward with his dripping pistol. He stood aside as a team with a log came running up against the gate. The gate groaned with the impact. Another rush and the bar inside snapped. Grenfell and Hines rushed through, pistols in hand, their blankets flung aside, and their Confederate officer’s gray and gold in full view.

DANFORTH STATION, MAINE, 4:20 AM, SEPTEMBER 30, 1863

The station manager at Danforth, the last station on the Grand Trunk before Portland, stopped the British trains by throwing the main switch. He had heard the cannon fire from the city and had seen the huge pyre of the burning railroad station. A dyed-in-the-wool Copperhead, the man had been part of the conspiracy to keep the railroad open straight to Portland. Now as the city burned and his countrymen died, he rushed to inform the British commander. His hatred for Lincoln had long ago passed beyond reason into a state of such self-sustaining bitterness that he would have his country strewn with corpses and ashes to see the man pulled down.

Maj. Gen. Sir Charles Ashe Windham, commanding the Portland Field Force, was not a man to take the word of a Yankee for anything. He would see for himself and climbed the station’s observation tower to view the city with his glass. The man commanding the British ground assault on Portland was a man of wide experience and heroic reputation. He had led the assault on the Redan in the Crimean War and defended Cawnpore during the Sepoy Mutiny. Wolseley had come to know and admire him in Canada and said of him that “he was a man of the world, he had many charming qualities: was never hard upon others in word or deed, and always inclined to make allowances for human failings.”

He scanned the city carefully. His immediate impression was that the Navy had botched its end. What had promised to be a smooth coup de main was now a full-pitched battle. “Well,” he muttered to his aide, “that’s usually the way military plans go. No one’s fault, just the way things go. Reminds me of a Russian military proverb I learned in the Crimea: ‘The plan was smooth on paper, only they forgot the ravines.’”¹⁹

He could see the Navy’s ships firing into the town. The main fort in the harbor also seemed to be firing into the town. At least the Navy had taken the fort. He quickly climbed down the spiral staircase and gave the order to dismount the trains. His lead brigade was built around the 62nd Foot with the Quebec-raised Canadian 50th Huntington Rangers, 51st Hemmingford Rangers, and 52nd Bedford militia battalions. Windham gave the command to force march the last few miles to the city.²⁰ He left his chief of staff to dispatch the artillery and the next two brigades built around the 17th and 63rd Foot. He was pleased to see the three Canadian battalions move out smartly and with little confusion. He knew that the 62nd Foot, “the Splashers,” had shown them a good example in training. There were still many veterans from the Crimea in the ranks. Their nickname came from the battle of Carrickfergus in 1758 when they had run out of bullets and used their buttons for ammunition. Since then their buttons had been issued dented, or “splashed”.

He had not gone a mile when Union cavalry pickets fired on his scouts. More cavalry came up to thicken the firing line and force him to deploy. His men’s Enfields had the range of the enemy’s breech-loading Sharps carbines, but the Americans could fire faster. He flanked them on both sides with Canadian companies, but the enemy cavalry mounted up and moved to the rear to throw a new skirmishing line up to repeat their delaying tactics. The men were behaving-smoothly and quickly, just as in training, despite the number of red-clad bodies littering their line of advance.

Windham had no illusions that the Americans would collapse at the first blow. It would take a rain of blows to beat them down, and he now knew that his men were up to it. He ordered them forward. They cheered him as they swept by.

CAMP MORTON, INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA, 4:20 AM, SEPTEMBER 30, 1863

Major Cline had caught the scent of the plot to free the prisoners and followed it until it brought him to the outskirts of Indianapolis in the blackness of that same morning. Hines and Grenfell had barely broken into Camp Morton when Cline and his cavalry had thundered up the darkened road and right into the Copperheads trying to push through the shattered gate. They shot the horses drawing the wagons loaded with rifles and sabered and pistoled their way through the Copperhead column, which came apart like a bursting sack of corn, spilling into the ditches and across the darkened fields.

Cline was the first Union man through the gate. Before him the barracks were emptying of Confederate prisoners as two officers in gray ran toward them. Cline spurred on until he came alongside the officer with long white hair, waving his hat on his sword and holding a pistol. He fired down into his thick mane. The man tumbled head over heels into a heap. The first prisoner to reach him jumped for his pistol, which had fallen in the mud. Cline shot him too. His men were riding up now and firing into the mass of prisoners. The panicked men in front tried to get away only to be pushed forward by all those coming from the barracks.

The guards were spilling out of their quarters and shooting at the heaving throng. The other rebel officer, Captain Hines, tried to rally the prisoners as he strode before them with his pistol in hand. “Come on, boys! Charge and the place is ours. Charge!” He waved his arm and ran forward, followed by a mass of rock-throwing men keening the Confederate yell. The gallant line withered in the fire from Cline’s men and the guards. Hines was the first to fall.

SOUTH OF DANFORTH STATION, MAINE, 5:10 AM, SEPTEMBER 30, 1863

The commander of the 1st Maine Cavalry, immediately upon contact with the British, had sent an accurate and detailed report back to Chamberlain. In turn, Chamberlain sent it to Dow with his appraisal that the British column was the main thrust aimed at Portland. On his own authority he ordered the reserve artillery battery to accompany his brigade north to hold the peninsula against God knew how many British. The men were glad to step off now that they knew their purpose. They had waited in ranks in a state of high agitation as they heard the battle at the docks rage and watched the station burn. Chamberlain now passed to his colonels the word to march with a note of explanation that the enemy was approaching from the north. With his infantry, cavalry, and gunners, Chamberlain would have at hand just short of fifteen hundred men. He did not know that the enemy’s advance brigade outnumbered him by 40 percent or that the follow-on force doubled that. He would be outnumbered more than three to one. He sensed that if he had any chance of holding the peninsula, he had to strike hard and fast and throw the enemy’s lead force back on its heels. He kept his cavalry out as a screen to slow and divert the enemy’s attention while he created a surprise.

He reinforced the cavalry with one battery and the small 10th and 16th Maine. That temporarily held the British up. The British guns weren’t up yet, and the shells from the Maine battery were tearing holes in their infantry. They may have been stopped, but they did not flinch and continued to return a heavy and accurate fire. Chamberlain stopped for a moment to admire them, but he had admired the 15th Alabama as well and had thrown them off Little Round Top. As he turned away, he was surprised to see the mayor ride up in his carriage. He waved and called out, “Colonel Chamberlain, Colonel Chamberlain.” Behind him Chamberlain saw a hurried column of men in civilian clothes and old uniforms, sporting all sorts of firearms. “Colonel Chamberlain, I have brought you the city militia and volunteers. General Dow said I was to help you with our boys. What do you want them to do?”

The last thing Chamberlain wanted was militia in a fight with redcoats. In an open field fight, they were a liability, just as they had been in the Revolution and the War of 1812. They were good for something, though. “Dig! I want them to dig a fighting trench from the inlet on Back Cove across the peninsula to the Canal Basin by the Fore River, behind the creek that empties into the cove. Get every spade and shovel in the town but have them start now with their hands if they have to.” Before riding off, he turned to a staff officer and said, “Captain, show them how it’s done.”

Windham was not a man to waste time on a stalemate. He could see that the Americans had reinforced their cavalry with some infantry and strong battery, and together they had thrown up too strong a front to waste lives smashing through it when maneuver would drive them back. Again he peeled off companies of the 51st Hemmingford Rangers to circle around the American right flank. He was surprised that the obvious maneuver had not forced the Americans to pull back even as his flankers were about to slip around them.

Then he understood as a volley from a new battery burst over his main fighting line. To the east a wave of American infantry had crested a small rise and was heading for his own rear while a larger group hit his flanking companies. He was about to be trapped. He sent an aide galloping to the rear to hurry the rest of his command forward. It soon became clear that the advancing Americans numbered not more than five hundred men while the force blocking his rear was even smaller. He concluded that his opponent had played a bold hand, but it was a bad hand. It was time to call the bluff. In the back of his mind he was already regretting leaving his guns behind in his haste to reach his objective.

He sent off more aides with orders. The Hemmingford Rangers were to turn about and clear the Americans off the road in the rear, the 62nd Foot to wheel about to the left and strike the Americans coming on the flanks, and the remaining two Canadian battalions were to hold the front against the cavalry. Had they all been line British battalions it would have gone off without a hitch, but Windham expected too much of his green Canadians. So far they had done very well, but the body-shredding shell and case shot and the sight of their flankers being overrun had shaken them. Windham’s coolness in the face of an enemy in his rear had the opposite reaction in his Canadian militia. They approached the line of troops in faded blue-the 17th Maine-with accelerating panic. With a single fluid motion the Americans took aim and fired, and the front Canadian ranks pitched forward or flew back. The Canadians received the command to aim just as shells burst overhead, whirling jagged metal through the ranks. They could manage only a ragged, ill-aimed volley. Again they heard the command, “Fire!” from their front. It was too brutal a baptism. They simply broke.

As the Canadians fled, the 62nd Foot and Chamberlain’s two remaining regiments locked horns. The British battalion outnumbered the 19th and 20th Maine whose original strength had been wasted by hard fighting over the last year. The remaining core was veteran and hard. The little regiments were also seething at the sight of redcoats on Maine soil, especially having that morning had to help clear the dead and wounded civilians from the streets of Portland around the station. Chamberlain threw the guns of his two batteries into the scale by directing them to concentrate on the British with canister. The guns wheeled into line. The British made for a splendid target, moving in elegant precision across the field. The Maine men took time to admire their high style before twelve guns poured tin cans filled with lead balls into them. The two regiments fired next. The 62nd Foot staggered from the blow. Windham’s aide flew from the saddle, and he himself felt a hammer strike him in the chest and throw him from his horse. He was dead when he struck the ground. The Splashers, with the amazing resilience of a British battalion, pulled themselves together and sent a volley into the Maine men, dropping dozens.

Chamberlain rode over to his old 20th Maine and found Major Ellis Spear, its new commander. “Ellis, give them the bayonet. The boys have got that one down, I think.” He winked at Ellis, who grinned and then shouted the command, “Fix bayonets!” There was a rustle of clicks as the slim, blued blades were locked into place. “Follow me, boys!” The 19th Maine joined the charge. As the Maine men howled their charge, the 62nd got off another well-aimed volley.

Then they showed why British infantry had maintained such a reputation over the centuries. They charged. The crimson and blue lines collided in that great rarity in military history. Bayonet charges rarely resulted in melees. Either the attacker flinched at the sight of an unbroken enemy, or the defenders panicked and took to their heels. But now it was bayonet and rifle butt and pistol in a stabbing, clubbing mob. British bayonet battle drill was deadly as the men operated in wedges of threes. The best bayonet man was at the apex in the center while his companions supported him from the sides. The Maine men knew a thing or two about the bayonet as well, but this time they were not crossing blades with the exhausted and thirsty 15th Alabama.

The commander of the cavalry screen saw his main chance when Chamberlain’s men charged. He ordered his three hundred men to mount and charge the two remaining Canadian battalions on his front. They unraveled in the face of the oncoming mass of cavalry and fled to the rear. The 1st Maine Cavalry harried the terrified militiamen until the roadblock of the 17th Maine stopped the survivors. They surrendered.

By then, the Splashers and Maine men had pulled away from each other, dragging their wounded after them, and glared in silence as sweat-soaked chests heaved. The irresistible force had met the unmovable object. Chamberlain was clear sighted enough to realize that it was time to go. If the enemy’s reinforcements he could see approaching were as tough as the shrunken redcoat band in front of him, his force would bleed to death on this field. Under the fire of his batteries, he ordered a careful retreat back to the Portland militia line. At least he could put the creek between him and the enemy. Chamberlain was the last man off the field. He paused long enough to throw a salute with his saber to the shrunken ranks of the Splashers before galloping off.

He was surprised to see how much they had accomplished in the few hours he had bought. Fear and the need to do something physical had carved a serviceable trench over half a mile. The city had poured out its tools, and fear had supplied the will. His Maine veterans quickly jumped into the trenches and added their experience to the militia’s energy. They had bought the time for the men of Portland to build the defenses to save their own city. These men now cheered as hundreds of enemy prisoners were prodded along past to be taken into Portland.

By the time the British and Canadian skirmishers gingerly approached, the trench system with its parapet would have earned passing marks from the Army of the Potomac’s perfection-minded chief engineer himself. Chamberlain had mixed the militia with his own men to thicken the line and leave none of it without experienced men. He figured that his veterans would steady the militia and teach them what they could not have learned on their own. The day was too far gone for the British to assault the line, even if they’d had the energy left for such a hazard. Night fell. The First Battle of Portland was over.²⁷

ALBANY, NEW YORK, 4:14 AM, OCTOBER 1, 1863

The Guards Brigade swept away the New York militia, which had gathered in the night, and marched into Albany eight hours after it crossed the border. Copperhead employees of the rail companies had kept the railroad open straight to Albany. The government men of the Empire State had fled in their nightshirts, a rendition of events Lord Paulet was planning to dine out on for years to come. He had the honor to wipe away the stain of the 1777 failure and defeat of Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne at Saratoga on the very road to Albany. That city was in panic, but he was in no mood to keep order. He wasn’t planning to stay long. Copperhead guides were taking parties of his men throughout the city to every site that supported the war effort: factories, foundries, warehouses, boats on the Hudson, and above all the Watervliet Arsenal. All were soon in flames. The fire and smoke fanned the panic of a fleeing populace. Paulet was glad to wave the fan himself if it would send out even more residents far and wide to spread tales of terror. He needed every advantage to multiply the power of his small force. Three more brigades were arriving as the city burned, giving Paulet more than ten thousand men. Canadian Volunteer Militia companies had been left as security at every station along the railroad back to Canada.

The reports of the British burning Albany ran ahead of the refugees and along the wires throughout the Union states. Coupled with the invasion of Maine and the initial report of the fall of Portland, the effect was stunning. New York City, the nation’s great emporium and financial center, seemed to shut down with the British Army less than a hundred miles away up the Hudson. Boston was no less afraid. Both feared a simultaneous assault from the sea, all the more real after the Royal Navy’s pursuit of Kearsarge into the Upper Bay itself. The wires to Washington burned with lurid tales of invasion as every governor with a northern border and every mayor within two hundred miles begged for massive reinforcements. This was worse than Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in the summer for there was no Army of the Potomac nearby ready to dog the invader and bring him to battle.

However, there were men of courage.

ROYAL NAVY DOCKYARD, IRELAND ISLAND, BERMUDA, 2:00 PM, OCTOBER 1, 1863

The entire ironclad strength of the Royal Navy-the HMS Warrior, Black Prince, Defence, and Resistance-steamed through the narrows of Ireland Island to the Royal Navy dockyard. The forts lining the thousand-yard passage fired their salutes to the iron might of the British race. At 9,200 and 6,100 tons the two pairs were the largest warships in the world and had come to reinforce Admiral Milne’s North American and West Indies Station. They had not come alone. The Channel Squadron had been stripped in an unprecedented move to dispatch five ships of the line and fifteen frigates, sloops, and corvettes, not to mention the dozen or so support and supply ships. The British had not suddenly lost their ancient fear of unchecked French power in the English Channel that they would send Milne so much of its striking power. Intense discussions with Napoleon III had resulted in the simultaneous dispatch of strong French squadrons to Mexico at the same time.

The Royal Navy dockyards in Britain had worked miracles to prepare such a strong force. Instructions had gone out immediately after Moelfre Bay for the Navy to prepare for major operations. The order to depart had followed the dispatch of the declaration of war only by hours. Similar orders had gone to the Army at the same time. Now twenty thousand British troops were sailing behind the warships in a half dozen convoys. The garrisons of the British Isles, particularly Ireland, had been stripped to gather such an expeditionary force to reinforce British North America. Not a man from the large force in India was taken. The memory of the mutiny still oozed fear and caution. Haste had been the watchword. Britain must strike her crippling blows before the winter closed operations until spring. Another convoy was heading north from Barbados with four thousand men of the British West Indies garrison, primarily men of the black West Indian Regiment.

Milne’s combined force now assembling at Bermuda was the strongest in sheer power that the Royal Navy had ever assembled. Many of these same wooden ships had only been converted to steam since the Crimean War. Moelfre Bay had imbued both officers and below decks with a righteous cause, though few bothered to consider that the Americans might describe the action as just desserts.

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, 2:20 PM, OCTOBER 1, 1863

The Western Union boy did not often come to this modest neighborhood and was surprised when the missus of the house actually gave him a nickel tip.

“Michael,” she said in the lilt of Ireland as she came into the kitchen, “it’s a telegram for you.” Michael William McCarter took it in his left hand. The strength had not come back to his right arm. It was the wound he took at Fredericksburg charging up Marye’s Heights with the Irish Brigade that had put his soldiering days behind him. He could use the arm, but its old strength was gone.

The telegram was addressed to Sgt. William McCarter. He opened it expectantly. MICHAEL STOP PUT ON THE BLUE STOP REPORT TO ME IN NEW YORK STOP MEAGHER. His eyes moistened. “Katie, he needs me again.” Memories welled up of the man he considered a paragon of manly and martial virtues. The memories of Meagher’s intemperance flitted over his mind as well and fell away, as McCarter saw him again on the fields of Antietam and Fredericksburg, always at the front in the thickest fire and framed by the regimental Green Flag of Ireland and the Stars and Stripes, or nursing the wounded in his own tent, wrapping them in his own blankets as he sat with them through the night. McCarter had come to know Meagher better than any other enlisted man and most of his officers. As a guard assigned to his tent, he had saved a besotted Meagher from falling into the fire. In gratitude, Meagher assigned him to his own headquarters and discovered his considerable administrative talents. McCarter finally broke from the arms of memory to shout, “Woman of the house, shake the mothballs from my uniform!”

At that very moment, Meagher was standing in a wagon in the streets of New York, holding in thrall a crowd of thousands of his fellow Gaels. Many of them had taken part in the riots only a few months before, diehard Democrats who would not fight for the Union. All that was swept away when the Royal Navy had entered the Upper Bay and especially now that the redcoats had followed them to this new land, hovering to strike from barely a hundred miles up the Hudson Valley. Many had accepted the new land and worn the blue, but many had not and nursed the resentments of poverty. The British hammer had now forged ancient grievance to new affection for the land that sheltered them. Their ambivalence had burned away. They were ready to fight.