Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War

11

THE WAR DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C., 11:50 PM, OCTOBER 1, 1863

It was in times of unending crisis and disaster that Edwin McMasters Stanton became a truly great man. He remained a rock of confidence in a sea of troubles, and from his office a stream of telegrams sung over the wires, bringing order and marshaling the power of the federal government. Autocratic, vengeful, ruthless, relentless, and inexhaustibly energetic, he set about the task of defeating the invasion and preparing for the counterblow that would make the British pay dearly, unaware that a raging fire had been kindled in the Union rear.

If he took a moment for reflection, it was to lament the fact that he had been warned about Albany’s vulnerability and to resent Sharpe for the warning. However, he was a man who could eat his revenge cold. He took some small satisfaction that Sharpe had been wrong about the threat from the Great Lakes; there was comfort in that everyone had been fooled there. Then again Sharpe’s ploy to get the Maine regiments home under the cover of recruiting had obviously come as a painful surprise to the British and saved Portland, for the moment at least.

The problem at hand was to save New York and Boston from attack. New York, especially, was the economic and financial heart of the Union. At all costs it must be saved. The arrival of the rest of the Russian squadron and the strengthening of the harbor forts would relieve him of worry of another attack by sea and give him a free hand to deal with the British in Albany. Hooker’s XI and XII Corps had entrained for their transfer to the relief of the Army of the Cumberland two days before. They would be turned around, and every other train would be sidelined to give them priority to New York City. Until then, they would have to rely on whatever forces were at hand to stop any British advance down the Hudson River Valley.

A silver lining of the draft riots was that a number of regiments that had been sent to suppress them were still in the city. The city’s remaining militia regiments were more experienced than would have been apparent. Many of them had served early in the war and had experienced men on their rolls. He ordered a call to all veterans not in the militia to reenlist and join the forces in the city. He was surprised to read in a telegram that Meagher had signed up more than ten thousand men from the Irish in one day, but they would not be ready in time to deal with this crisis. He did take time, though, to dictate to a clerk approval and praise of Meagher’s actions and his appointment as a brevet major general with instructions to telegraph it immediately.

As if to prove the aphorism “It never rains but that it pours,” one of the Union’s major field armies had found itself trapped in Chattanooga whence it had fled after its defeat at Chickamauga. It was obvious Rosecrans was in a funk, or he would not have let that old woman Bragg finally get up the gumption to follow him much less put him under siege. And now the men were beginning to starve. If “Old Rosy” gave up at a time like this, then the entire line of the Ohio would fall. He could not pluck any more units from Meade’s Army of the Potomac or Lee would be in Washington at the drop of a hat. The only other major source of troops was Grant’s command, but much of that concentration had been nickel-and-dimed to tidy up a number of small problems Halleck’s too orderly mind had obsessed about and to reinforce Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks for a Texas expedition that Lincoln favored. Stanton would have immediately called Grant to the scene, but the man was barely able to move after his horse had fallen on him in New Orleans. Stanton knew his options were running thin.

That dilemma came down to a choice between New York and Chattanooga. The XI and XII Corps could not be in both places at once, and to send one to each crisis would do little good in either place. In the end, Lincoln made the decision-New York. Rosy would have to hang on and wait for Grant. That night Hooker received a telegram that appointed him to command the new Army of the Hudson. The corps would be diverted to New York immediately.

The lights burned late at the Navy Department as well. Gideon Welles may not have had Stanton’s greatness in a crisis, but he was steady and a superb administrator. Backed up by a fighting assistant secretary, Gus Fox, he bent to his work. On his own, Fox had immediately dispatched ships to carry the news of war to the naval forces in Hampton Roads and the two blockading squadrons at Wilmington and Charleston.

In many ways the Navy faced a greater challenge than the Army did. Only a small part of the Army would or could be devoted to the British war. Most of it was locked in a struggle with the rebels and would have to remain so. Almost the entire Navy, save its riverine forces, would be going into harm’s way. Britannia’s mighty fist, its Royal Navy, would do everything in its power to bring the war home to America.

Already in Europe, American shipping was desperately sailing for neutral ports. Those that had not had the good sense to depart British ports after Moelfre Bay had already been seized. The Navy could do little to protect American commerce on the seas when it found strained to the breaking point to defend American harbors. Memories of the outrages perpetrated by the Royal Navy on the ports and coastal towns of the North sent a chill down the spine of every American. Those memories were also a spur to the naval service to see that they did not happen again. This time, the game was not so completely in the Royal Navy’s favor. But the chancelleries of Europe would have given the U.S. Navy only the longest of odds.

Certainly the Quay d’Orsay did not. What Napoleon III would not dare to do on his own, he would be glad to do now that the British led the way. The French ambassador, Count Edouard-Henri Mercier, delivered the emperor’s declaration of war the day after the British announcement, citing truly ludicrous justifications. Seward almost laughed in his face. Stanton and Welles could only count the addition of the French fleet and especially its large Army in Mexico to the order of battle of their country’s enemies.

The Russian alliance, when it became known, would serve to complicate British-French plans wonderfully. Forces that would have gone to North America would have to be diverted to bottling up the Russians again in the Baltic and Black seas. But this time, the cat was out of the bag. The presence of two Russian squadrons in American ports was proof the Russians were not about to repeat the errors of the Crimean War. The strong Russian squadron in New York was a vital addition to the protection of the port. For good reason that night Welles wrote in his diary, “God bless the Russians.”

Towering over them was Lincoln, who rallied the English language in its majestic cadences drawn from the Bible and Shakespeare to the defense of the nation. Men are moved by words and define themselves by words. While his secretaries of war and the Navy organized the nation’s defenses, Lincoln gathered and arrayed his words for battle. He addressed a joint session of Congress and asked for a declaration of war against the British Empire in terms that riveted every member, Republican and Democrat alike. It was not a long speech, but expressed with a simple dignity, its elemental truth and directness had the members soaring. His words bound up all the hopes of the American democracy as the foundation stone, not only of the progress of the American people, but of all mankind. It was a speech for the ages, and men who had been with Lincoln since the beginning said it bested even his speech at the Cooper Union in Boston when he was seeking the nomination, the speech that had thrilled and moved his skeptical Eastern audience to set his feet on the road to the presidency. His words sang over the wires throughout the North and by ship across the seas to Europe and the Americas.

A copy rapidly found its way to the tent of Robert E. Lee, who gave it his complete attention. The news of the British invasion had sparked a general celebration of deliverance across the South, but in his tent Lee read Lincoln’s speech. The man whose heart had broken in the choice between Virginia and the United States clutched the paper in his hand and wept.

And well he might, for the Union people were tinder into which a match had been thrown. Doubts, demoralization, political differences were being consumed in the fire of an anger that had stirred them to their depths. A foreign invader on American soil, especially in a red coat, come to support the rebellion destroyed all restraint. The people were uncoiling their strength. Where the draft had failed to extract men, now volunteers flooded recruiting stations. New York State and the city, particularly, answered the call. It was not only the Irish who had done a volte-face. Patricians like Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., who had stood above the war and bought substitutes, now presented themselves for duty. Roosevelt organized a new brigade and commanded it through the rest of the war. His veterans remember that he came to the recruiting station with his little boy Teddy in tow.

OFFICE OF THE CENTRAL INFORMATION BUREAU, LAFAYETTE PARK, WASHINGTON, D.C., 12:05 AM, OCTOBER 2, 1863

Sharpe’s office was deluged with reports that overwhelmed his order-of-battle analysts, even the imperturbable, tireless Wilmoth. At least they had had a good understanding of the British forces before the war. The difficult part now was trying to identify where the different regiments were showing up and to put the operational puzzle together. The problem was that it was far too early in the game to get any results. They had only the wildest rumors from a few militiamen who had fled Albany, and their reports reeked more of hysteria than careful observation. Sharpe had to admit that they had absolutely no idea what was going on in Maine. There were rumors that the Guards Brigade was in Albany and that thirty thousand men were coming by train from Montreal. That latter tale was absurd; the British didn’t have thirty thousand men in all of their North American possessions. Even with the Volunteer Militia, they couldn’t put that many men together for one operation. It was not long before Wilmoth was pulling a few rabbits out of hats. While everyone had been focused on agent reports, he found some useful information in the British Gentleman’s Magazine on the strength of the imperial battalions sent to Canada, specifically a complete order of battle of the Guards Brigade. Sharpe shook his head, laughing to himself at how often open sources trumped the most carefully held secrets.

But Sharpe needed time, and he needed a commander on the scene who understood the value of intelligence. He had been immensely relieved to find out that Hooker was commanding the new Army of the Hudson. There was no better friend of military intelligence, and he and Sharpe had parted on good terms when the former had been relieved as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Hooker and Lowe had also been on the best of terms. For those reasons, Sharpe had sent a company of Lowe’s Balloon Corps to support the new field army.

In the seven weeks since he had assumed control of his beloved Balloon Corps, Lowe had worked miracles. Luckily, there had been six superb silk balloons and their gas-generating equipment in storage in the Washington Arsenal. Six more had been recently delivered. With Sharpe’s support, Lowe had reassembled the military personnel he had worked with before and the civilian aeronauts who had flown the balloons for him. The latter were now commissioned officers in the new Balloon Corps flush with money, equipment, and personnel. He had organized the corps into six companies built around pairs of balloons, with gas generators, crews, and support staffs. Two or more companies formed a battalion. Sharpe had been very clear that these companies could be attached to various field armies as were Signal Corps personnel, but their organization and support were in the hands of the Balloon Corps, which reported to him. Lowe’s confidence was now unbounded that he had a resolute patron in Sharpe. It did not hurt that Sharpe had an even more resolute patron in Lincoln.

Sharpe also plucked Capt. John McEntee from Major General Meade’s staff with the Army of the Potomac. McEntee had been one of Sharpe’s deputies when he ran the Army’s Bureau of Military Information as well as a fellow native of Kingston. He would set up a similar bureau on Hooker’s new staff. With him Sharpe sent an able lieutenant and a half dozen order-of-battle analysts, all recently pushed through the CIB’s new school in Georgetown. The Signal Corps had howled when Sharpe had raided its own Georgetown “camp of instruction” for bright young men. He had an ulterior motive as well, to acquire trained signalmen and cipher clerks.

Meade would loudly protest the loss of McEntee, but he was getting a lot of practice at that. Poor George Meade. His war after Gettysburg had been far from satisfying. Lee had led him in a fruitless dance of maneuver across Northern Virginia, running out the clock on the last of the year’s campaigning season. Now his Army of the Potomac would suffer the death of a thousand cuts, supplying forces for the crises that were busting out all over the place. First the division from VI Corps had been sent to Buffalo, the three thousand Maine men had been detached, and then XI and XII Corps had been started north to Albany-a day late and a dollar short, to be sure, but still lost to Meade’s command. Now the rest of John Sedgwick’s VI Corps was heading north to save Portland. VI Corps was the core of the Army now after Gettysburg and Big John Sedgwick Meade’s most reliable commander; his corps had been held in reserve and hardly engaged at all. Every other corps, except XII Corps, had been badly cut up and the finest combat commanders killed or wounded at Gettysburg. Reynolds of I Corps fell on the first day, Sickles of III Corps lost a leg on the second day, and the day after Hancock of II Corps had been wounded severely in the thigh. Meade would have to go on the defensive and hope he could find a position as good as Gettysburg’s hills and ridges, for “Bobby Lee” could smell opportunity better than any man alive and would come sniffing right soon around his flanks.

Sharpe considered going up to New York himself to see that Hooker’s intelligence operation was put in order and to organize his other collection assets more tightly, but the telegram from Major Cline had set him on edge. Even more had been the roundabout way it had come because every telegraph line to the Midwest had gone dead over the last two days. Cline’s message was already almost four days old. If the Copperheads had succeeded in freeing the Confederate prisoners in Indianapolis, that could explain a lot, he thought.

It was worse than he realized. Washington had been isolated for the last two days from quick communication with the Midwest-as the Copperheads and their Confederate and British advisers had planned. The capital was already reeling from the British invasion of New York and Maine and had barely steadied itself through the examples of Lincoln, Stanton, and Welles. Had the capital known that Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had been engulfed in revolt, panic might have overwhelmed even these men’s courage.

Thousands of armed Copperheads had seemingly sprung from the earth, all too often led by Southern officers. Their agents in the telegraph offices and railroads had sabotaged communications thoroughly. Federal officials and Loyalists had been arrested, and more than a few had been killed. Larger numbers had swarmed soldiers guarding warehouses and railroads. Key railroads and river crossings had been seized. Worst of all had been the assault on the federal prisoner of war camps. Camp Douglas in Chicago, the largest of them all, had fallen. Seven thousand Confederate prisoners had been freed, armed, and organized in the heart of the largest and most important city of the Midwest. As Lincoln delivered his speech before Congress, unknown to Washington, the Stars and Bars flew over Chicago, snapping in the cold wind that howled down from Canada across broad Lake Michigan. It could have been far worse without men like Major Cline and Hooker’s Horse Marines scotching the attack on Camp Morton.

THE BORDER CROSSING, BROWNSVILLE, TEXAS, 2:30 PM, OCTOBER 4, 1863

The French knew how to stage a military parade, and for their crossing of the border between Mexico and Texas at Brownsville they pulled out all the stops. To the light air of a cavalry march, Maj. Gen. François Achille Bazaine, commander of French forces in Mexico, led a regiment of Chasseurs d’Afrique across the border into Brownsville from Matamoros. The forced cheers of the sullen Mexicans in Matamoros were in contrast to the wild cheers of the Texans as the gaudy French Colonial Cavalry clattered through the streets.

The French occupation of Mexico had arisen out of a French-British-Spanish intervention to collect debts owed to their nationals. When the British and Spanish left, the French stayed. Napoleon III had designs on the country now that the Monroe Doctrine had been suspended by the distraction of the Civil War. He was in the process of installing an Austrian duke as a figurehead emperor, backed up by fifty thousand French troops. Now this advance guard of twenty thousand troops was marching into Texas in their baggy red trousers, red caps, and dark blue coats. Their bayonets sparkled in the bright sun.

Although the French jackal would not lead in this war, it would go where the British lion would not. The British had been faced with a conundrum in their decision to go to war with the Union, one they had mulled over as early as the Trent Affair two years before. Did war with the United States automatically mean recognition of and alliance with the Confederacy? Even then slavery had been so odious that the British had studiously decided to avoid any formal military cooperation, much less recognition and alliance. In two years slavery had not become any less odious, and the British had decided that they would separate the two issues officially. Napoleon had seen no necessity for such a distinction and followed his declaration of war with immediate recognition of the Confederacy, something he had not bothered to discuss with London. Lord Russell astutely understood that it would be impossible to come up with a formula on slavery “which the southerners would agree to, and the people of England approve of. The French Government are more free from the shackles of principle and of right and wrong on these matters… than we are.”

Napoleon was playing for different stakes and was well aware that should the Union triumph against the Confederacy, it would surely turn its wrath on the French presumption to carve out a colony in North America. A Union defeat then was the guarantee of a continued French free hand in Mexico. Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Congress were all too happy to confirm that guarantee as the price of recognition and alliance. They had to swallow hard because in January of that same year, Davis had to chastise severely the French consuls in Richmond and Galveston for, in the words of the Austrian ambassador in Washington, “imprudent ardor to foment a revolution in Texas against Mr. Jefferson Davis” in hopes of creating a buffer state under French protection. The French were being more than prudent. There had been enough evidence before the war of a decided Southern interest in annexing more of Mexico. That interest had not disappeared. Both sides had smiled and pretended that each would not immediately repudiate the agreement when the time was right.

Bazaine was a product of colonial war. He had gained renown in fighting in North Africa, where he had become a colonel of the Foreign Legion, and as had Williams in Canada, he had gained fame in the Crimean War. In Mexico he had handled a division with great skill, defeating a Mexican army and compelling the surrender of Puebla in May, which opened the way to Mexico City for the French Expeditionary Army. This French general was nobody’s fool; he could put the Union’s political generals to shame. He was aware of France’s ambitions in this region and made sure they supported his own. Much glory would accrue to the French general who liberated New Orleans.

He would not have to rely only on the troops he was bringing from Mexico. A strong French fleet was at this moment sailing toward Galveston to break the blockade and disembark strong reinforcements. The fleet then would support his attack on the first city of the South. The emperor had been known to say privately that his uncle’s sale of that city and the immense territory it governed had been a colossal mistake. It had occurred to Bazaine that once the city was again in French hands, the emperor would be loath to give it up. The future was pregnant with such opportunities.

SOUTH ATLANTIC BLOCKADING SQUADRON, CHARLESTON HARBOR, SOUTH CAROLINA, 11:00 AM, OCTOBER 5, 1863

Ever since his son had arrived with the ship that brought the news of war, Rear Adm. John Dahlgren had been looking over him in unguarded moments. He was searching to see if the gallant lad who had gone off to war early last year, still a teenager, still showed some spirit, or if losing a leg had also killed something in him. Lincoln had been a good friend in writing him of Ulric’s recovery. It had been an ongoing agony for the father to know that he had two sons hovering near death in Washing-ton-Ullie wounded at Gettsyburg and Charlie wracked with fever from Vicksburg. Dahlgren had written,The Sabbath arrives, and with it the brother who, wasted by the malaria and summer sun of the Mississippi Valley, had had just sufficient strength to crawl homeward for care and cure under his father’s roof. Both are but wrecks of the active, care-free lads who went out from their home and offered their mite to the great cause.… In retrospect there is nothing to regret.

He had known no more joy than seeing Ullie waving to him from the dispatch boat that had brought him to the flagship. In the next few hectic days his gaze would linger on Ullie as he hobbled on his crutches across the deck or struggled awkwardly to learn to walk with his new cork leg. Dahlgren’s stern Swedish heritage kept him from showing the emotions that pulsed through him as he remembered the lithe, leopardlike grace of the splendid horseman and dancer who had swept away the heart of every girl in Washington. He could see that same intensity in Ullie that had made him excel at everything he had attempted. He was the same as his little boy, who would fall down and get right back up. The boy had mastered horses, dancing, and the saber. What was the cork leg then? Twenty years old and already a hero and a full colonel.

The day after he arrived, his father watched Ullie intently studying the gun drill of the crew, especially the Marines manning the 5.1-inch Dahlgren rifle on the spar deck. He remembered little Ullie at the Navy Yard, not yet ten years old, watching the gun drill his father had modified for his new guns with just as much intensity. The sailors had thought him a lucky mascot and were glad to have him around. When his father was not around, they had let him help serve the gun in practice. Initially, the Marines had been nervous about having an Army colonel-a Navy captain equivalent-watching so closely, especially the admiral’s son and a “peg leg” to boot, but he seemed to know his way around the guns as well as any man and better than some. After a while, the earnest and engaging young man became a favorite of the Marines.

It was only a glance here and there the admiral could spare. It had not been lost on him that he was most assuredly going to be the first American naval officer to command a full fleet action. Heretofore, the U.S. Navy’s battle record had been mostly in single ship-to-ship combat or small contingents at most. Oliver Hazard Perry had come closest in 1813 on the Great Lakes, but what Dahlgren faced would dwarf that combat.

His South Atlantic Blockading Squadron numbered seventy-eight vessels but could not have resembled Admiral Milne’s force assembled at Bermuda less. As the name of Dahlgren’s force indicated, it was designed to blockade the shallow coasts and harbors of the South. Milne’s command was designed to fight great fleet actions on the high seas. Of Dahlgren’s almost four score ships, only four were traditional, wooden, purpose-built warships-one frigate and three sloops. Nine more ships were the new ironclads-the broadside ship New Ironsides and all eight of the Passaic class single-turreted monitors. There were another ten gunboats. The rest were small screw or side-wheel steam ships, small sailing ships with mortars, or supply ships, and none were more than a thousand tons (see Appendix B). Secretary Welles had promised him four new monitors when they were completed within two months. Dahlgren concluded that it might as well be a year for all the good they would do him. He could smell war on the wind from Bermuda.

Of all his ships, only twenty were off Charleston when he received the news of war with Britain on September 28. The rest of his ships were covering the numerous small islands, river mouths, and islets along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia or were at the squadron’s main forward operating base a hundred miles to the south at Port Royal. A few small, fast ships prowled the waters from Bermuda and Nassau for blockade-runners.

Dahlgren immediately ordered the assembly of his squadron off Charleston. The repair crews at Port Royal were ordered to bend every effort to get the three Passaic class monitors there in the repair yard back to sea and on the way to Charleston. Welles had warned him that the British might make an attempt to break the blockade at Charleston or Wilmington. Dahlgren had no doubt it would be Charleston even if Wilmington was a more active and successful port for blockade-runners. The war had started here, and here is where the Navy kept its heavy punchers. He was ordered to give battle and under no circumstances abandon his station. It was obvious that he could not meet the Royal Navy in deep water. His slow monitors would be at the mercy of the faster-sailing British ships, and his purpose-built frigates and sloops and gunboats would be overwhelmed by the firepower of ships of the line. He concluded that the advantage would lie in forcing the British to operate in the shallows, where their deep-draft ships would be at a disadvantage. He must have warning that the British were coming, and to ensure that, he scattered his lighter, fast ships across the path the Royal Navy would have to take from Bermuda. He wondered what measures the commanders of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron off Wilmington and the forces in Hampton Roads based at Norfolk would be taking.

Admiral Milne had given serious thought to those questions as well. Around him from the bridge of his flagship, HMS Nile, he could see the largest and infinitely more powerful fleet Britain had sent into battle since Trafalgar. The four huge ironclads surged ahead, the sharp spearhead of the fleet, followed by ten ships of the line and fifteen frigates, sloops, and corvettes. Behind them trailed a flotilla of supply ships. For their common objective along the South Carolina coast another squadron of four ships of the line and eight smaller ships had just departed the main force for its rendezvous with the transports carrying the four thousand men of the West Indian garrison of Barbados and the other islands.

Milne was thinking several moves ahead, which is why his thoughts turned to the enemy’s naval forces at Wilmington and Hampton Roads. Beyond them was the broad mouth of the Chesapeake, leading to the enemy’s capital, which was captured and burned in a similar foray by his predecessors in 1814. To repeat the feat within forty-nine years would surely make the Americans choke on their insufferable pride. He would iron the smile right off their faces.

First he would have to deal with Dahlgren’s force at Charleston. And of that force, he was fully apprised of its numbers, strengths, and weaknesses. Except for the monitors, Dahlgren had few ships that could match any of his, certainly not his ships of the line. Even the monitors, he thought, were overrated. His captains, on port visits to the Northern states and among their forces at sea, had heard the same complaints-monitor duty was unpopular, the conditions were brutal, and, of course, there was no opportunity for prize money, something the British naval officer could fully understand. But he did not underestimate John Dahlgren. The American’s reputation stood very high in the Royal Navy for developing his remarkable series of guns. Already he was called the “father of American naval ordnance.” Milne, however, chose to emphasize the fact that Dahlgren had had only eight years at sea and never commanded anything of this size or complexity. Even with the vaunted monitors he had not been able to subdue the defenses of Charleston Harbor. Fort Sumter, though beaten into a rubble pile, still stood defiant, as did the forts on the two opposing shores of the harbor.

WEST POINT FOUNDRY, COLD SPRING, NEW YORK, 9:20 AM, OCTOBER 5, 1863

The “deep-breathing furnaces, and the sullen, monotonous pulsations of trip hammers” of the great cannon West Point Foundry at Cold Spring, were much on their minds of two men. This greatest iron foundry in the world was producing hundreds of the U.S. Army’s splendidly accurate Parrot rifled cannons a year and close to a million shells. As accurate as the British Armstrong but more reliable given its muzzle-loading design, this gun was an insurmountable advantage for the Union that the Confederates could only lag behind. They could only acquire such guns through capture or by importation of a very few British Whitworth rifled cannon, a poor substitute for Vulcan’s workshop on the Hudson.

Lincoln himself had toured the huge facility early in 1862, walking through the mud as delighted with the raw power of the technological wonder as any boy at the circus.Lincoln watched 100-pounder and 200-pounder Parrott rifles hurl their heavy shells thousands of yards through a gap in the highlands to the precipitous banks of “Crows Nest,” while the deep clamor of gunfire echoed back from the hills like the roar of a great battle. Afterwards, he tramped delightedly about the plant, regardless of mud and rain. Raised a few inches from the ground on sleepers were bars of iron four inches square and sixty feet long, ready to be heated red-hot and coiled around mandrels by machinery. Near by, Lincoln saw these coiled bars welded by a great trip hammer, turned down, reheated and shrunk onto guns-forming the bands which were the trademark of the Parrotts. His face felt the heat and dazzle of the foundry where the guns were cast. He looked on as they were bored, rifled, turned and polished. And in another building he watched workmen turn out Parrott shells, distinguished by the brass expanding ring for taking the rifle grooves. Before Lincoln left Cold Spring, he had had seen about all there was to see in the making of rifled cannon.

Three days after Lincoln left, the first batch of guns was shipped to Major General McClellan, who was fighting on the approaches to Richmond. But it was not the great pieces that Lincoln saw at the testing range that armed so many of the field batteries of the Union field armies. It was the 10- and 20-pounder medium and heavy field guns. The latter, posted on Little Round Top, had cut long, gory furrows through the ranks of the Virginians and North Carolinians who had marched to glory and slaughter in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. One shot alone brought down almost fifty men.

This beating fiery heart of the Union war effort was much on the minds of two men as Albany’s funeral pyre sent its smoke down the Hudson River Valley. British raiding parties steaming down the Hudson or striking nearby cities were scorching the ability of the Union to make war. Barely ten miles to the north of Albany, Schenectady, a growing industrial city of ten thousand, was the first to feel the enemy’s hand. British troops marched into the city to destroy the Schenectady Locomotive Works, which had already produced eighty-four superb locomotives for the federal government’s war effort. Thirty miles south of Albany, the thriving river port of Hudson was the next target because of the Hudson Iron Company’s ironworks. It was also the country’s major inland refining and distribution center for whale oil. All it took was one overeager Canadian militiaman to throw a torch into one of the warehouses filled to the ceiling with refined oil. The fire exploded the building, sending flaming jets of whale oil through the air and flooding down streets. Its magnificent opera house was quickly wreathed in flames as the liquid fire licked up the walls. Soon the entire town was ablaze, and a huge pall of black, greasy smoke floated down the valley.

Maj. Gen. Lord Paulet’s orders, courtesy of Wolseley, had included a red-line paragraph to send a raiding party downriver, if practicable, to destroy the foundry at Cold Spring. With Watervliet Arsenal a gutted ruin, Paulet’s appetite had been whetted. A guards’ officer did not normally think in terms of destroying the enemy’s industrial base, but he did often think of fame. And Wolseley had spent a great deal of time exciting Paulet’s ambition by explaining how well this stroke would be received in England, where the idea of the world’s greatest foundry being in America did not sit well at all.

The other man with the foundry on his mind was Lincoln. He vividly remembered the heat of the blast furnaces on his face and the smell of metal as it was cut and shaped by the great lathes and hammers. The place was as alive to him as a beating heart. He knew the Union could lose whole armies before it lost the foundry. He personally went to the War Department Telegraph Office and wired Hooker to protect it if he did nothing else.

Hooker did not need to be told twice. For all his defeat at Chancellorsville, Joseph Hooker was a remarkably good soldier. As a corps commander he had been one of the best the Union had produced. As an Army commander he had introduced innovative reforms that revitalized the Army of the Potomac and gave it the organization with which it had whipped Lee at Gettsyburg. Hooker was that rare transformational man who could see the future and summon it to the present. He had been Sharpe’s patron and the godfather of the first real professionalization of intelligence. Thus, he saw at an instant how vital the foundry was to the Union. The two corps that formed the striking power of his new Army of the Hudson would not arrive soon enough.

The aide had to fight his way through the crowds of Irishmen at Meagher’s recruiting offices to present Hooker’s instructions to report to him at once. Meagher was ushered immediately through the headquarters’ hive of activity into Hooker’s presence. The big, blond general rose and walked across the room, extending his hand to Meagher. “Tom, you don’t know how glad I am to have a Third Corps man I trust here. Congratulations on the promotion and the recruiting. Are you trying to bring the old corps back up to strength all by yourself?”

“Yes, if it includes my old brigade. I must have the Irish Brigade. I must bring it back to life.”

“Well, I doubt Lincoln will deny you anything with all the thousands you have recruited in so few days. But the President needs a bold man now, Tom, and I cannot think of a bolder man than ‘Meagher of the Sword.’ Come, let’s look at the map.” His finger touched down on Cold Spring just across the river from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “This is the situation, Tom. I have a direct presidential order to save the foundry. Without it, we would be hard pressed to stay in the fight. My two corps have not arrived, and neither has recovered from the Gettysburg bloodletting; together they might make one full-strength corps.”

He paused briefly, his thoughts running along a different path. “The Germans of XI Corps, you know, the ‘Damned Dutch,’ they ran at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Well, Tom, I ran at Chancellorsville, too, in a way. I ran away from command. I just lost faith in Joe Hooker. At least they had a better excuse. It’s a rare soldier who will not flinch when his flank is turned, and the enemy is shooting you in the back.” He looked out the window silently for a few moments, his thoughts lingering over that stricken field just over the Rappahannock in distant Virginia. His reverie broke, and his blue eyes were all business. “Well, Tom, both the Damned Dutch and I have a second chance.”

Meagher’s heart had been touched that his old commander would honor him with this confidence so straight from the heart. From his own heart, he said, “And well I should know it, General. I, who nearly swung on the Queen’s gallows and was sent to rot in the desolation of western Australia, was rescued by America, which gave me back my life and my hope. This is the land of second chances, and third and fourth, and is always generous to those who don’t quit. I am a living testament to that.” He paused, “And so will you, General, you and the Damned Dutch.”

Hooker half smiled to himself, buoyed by the Irishman’s pluck. “Well, back to the point. I must keep the regiments I have in the city or the people will panic. The smoke from Albany has terrified them, and they did not need much after John Bull sailed into the Upper Bay ten days ago. How many veterans can you assemble among your recruits? Just veterans.”

“At the very most, several hundred men I would trust with arms.”

“Draw arms, equipment, and uniforms for them immediately. I will write out the order now and arrange for the transports to take you there. Secure the foundry until I can send a brigade up there. Leave tonight with the men you can ready. ‘It is better to be at the right place with ten men than absent with ten thousand.’ I always thought Tamerlane had a perfect sense of these things.

“And Tom, think. If you are lucky, the redcoats will come.”

HEADQUARTERS, ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA, ORANGE COURT HOUSE, VIRGINIA, 3:40 PM, OCTOBER 5, 1863

Robert E. Lee’s style of military intelligence was old-fashioned in that like George Washington, he was his own intelligence chief. Over time, it was no match for Sharpe’s superior organization and resources, but it worked when it had to. This was one of those times.

Gettysburg had sorely tried not only the strength of his Army but its faith in itself. Twinned with the loss of Vicksburg, the South had lost almost sixty thousand men in those few days in July. The progress of defeat had seemed inexorable until Providence had set the British and the Yankees at each other’s throats. Now victory, so seemingly perched on the enemy’s shoulder, was offering her laurels again to the Confederacy, and Lee had leapt to grab them.

His intelligence sources told him accurately of the reinforcements stripped from Meade’s army and sent north to stem the British tide. That left Meade with barely sixty thousand men. Even with Longstreet’s corps at Chattanooga, Lee numbered his troops at fifty-three thousand, near parity. Given that he had always been heavily outnumbered, parity was a sheer, undreamed of advantage. He marched.