Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War

12

COLD SPRING, NEW YORK, 2:02 PM, OCTOBER 6, 1863

Meagher had reached Cold Spring early that afternoon. Upriver, the smoke from burning boats and towns was hanging over the Hudson Valley. Major General Paulet had followed Wolseley’s advice and ravaged his way south. At Albany and other river towns he had seized ships to carry raiding parties down the river to harry and panic the Americans. He had succeeded in sending waves of refugees from the river towns and farms south toward the city and into the countryside.

Meagher and his scratch command of barely two hundred men had gone upriver in a commandeered steamboat past hordes of craft coming south, their decks filled with refugees. The captain had refused to take them until Meagher had stuck his pistol in the man’s mouth and said, “I’m not joking, sir,” as he cocked the piece. The captain suddenly gushed cooperation and hastened the transfer of Meagher’s men aboard. A strange lot they were, too. Meagher had been lucky to find two hundred veterans among his horde of Irish volunteers. Half were from his old Irish Brigade, and most had been invalided out for wounds. There were too many limping legs and favored arms, but they were volunteers, and they wore their kit and handled their rifles as if it were second nature to them. He had seen more than one pair of eyes glow as man after man grasped the Springfield muskets fresh from the armory. Mc-Carter had arrived on the morning train. Meagher had promoted him sergeant major on the spot to pick the sergeants and corporals and whip them into the semblance of a unit in the few hours they had. Finding the uniforms had been impossible, all except the caps with the brass infantry bugle. The women had come to the rescue with red, white, and blue bunting armbands. That and the oath he administered would satisfy the laws of war that they were lawful combatants.

At the last moment, as the men lined the railings while the crew threw off the lines and the ship began to edge away from the dock, a carriage clattered up the dock with a young woman carrying a green flag on a staff. It was Libby, Meagher’s beautiful, young wife, her red hair bright around the edges of her bonnet. She alighted from the carriage and, carrying the flag, ran up to the ship. “Oh, Tom, Tom!” she cried out to the crowd on the railing. “Do not forget the flag, Tom!” It was the color of the 69th New York, one of the regiments of the Irish Brigade, and presented to him by the survivors when he had resigned. It had stood in the corner of his study ever since, ragged and stained with dust and blood, but its emerald green field and golden harp still were bright.

The men on the deck stirred at the sight, which was more than feminine gallantry but instantly evoked images of Ireland itself anthropomorphized in this young woman. Almost as if commanded by this goddess of myth, the ship edged back to the dock and the gangway was lowered. As it touched the dock, Meagher hurried down and took his wife into his arms. The kiss was long and passionate as the men cheered Meagher of the Sword and his goddess, lady of Erin. Then, flag in hand, he bounded up the gangway.

The kiss was still sweet on his lips as the ship docked at Cold Spring and was challenged immediately by young men in cadet gray. The commandant of the U.S. Military Academy across the river had sent over a hundred of his cadets to guard the foundry under the command of one of their officer instructors. Meagher was pleased to see that that they had not wasted their time but had trundled a half dozen of the 10-pounder Parrot guns from the foundry down to defend the dock with the aid of many of the foundry’s fourteen hundred workers. The officer had organized his cadets into gun teams, and they seemed to know their way around the pieces, which had been admirably hidden from direct view.

Meagher barely had time to inspect the ad hoc defense when a cadet came racing down the street on long legs, his cap lost and blond hair whipping behind him, and clutching a telescope in his hand. He stopped in front of his officer and then recognized Meagher’s major general’s stars in a moment of confusion. He blurted out, “They’re coming. I ran down from the church steeple, sir, where you stationed me to look. There’s an armed boat with red-coated men aboard coming down the river.”

Meagher asked, “How long, boy, before they get here?”

“Sir, twenty minutes at most.”

In eighteen minutes the ship steamed up to the dock. Meagher peered, half hidden, through a window next to the battery screened by a wall of empty barrels. Two Armstrong field pieces were mounted on the deck, which was crowded with several companies of British troops. He was surprised to see with what confidence they came right up to the dock, confidence borne of meeting little or no resistance as they fired their way down the Hudson Valley. He was even more surprised to recognize the big men whose uniforms bore the facings of the Scots Fusilier Guards. Others, not so uniformly robust and big, had different facings and somehow did not move with the easy assurance of the guards. Canadian militia, no doubt. Canister would make no such distinction, but the Queen would feel the loss of her own guardsmen more deeply than the colonials would. Well, he thought, it was time the world’s most famous widow had something else to mourn.

The ship bumped up against the dock. Shrill voices of the NCOs echoed up the street as the men began double-timing down the gangplank. They began to fan out over the docks when Meagher gave the command to fire. The barrels masking the guns were knocked over and canister-tin cans filled with hundreds of bullet-sized lead balls-scythed into the men rushing over the docks, crowding down the gangplank, packing the decks, and clustering around the deck-mounted Armstrongs. Rifle fire from his hidden riflemen cut down the men who had made it to the street. The cadets leapt to the guns, as they had in their artillery training, to swab out the barrels and ram home new powder bags and canisters. Again they fired.

“Cease fire!” Meagher shouted to give the smoke a chance to clear. The ship was a charnel house, riddled and splintered, with its decks and gangplank piled with the dead and wounded. The pilothouse was a wreck as well. “Charge!” His Irishmen sprang from cover with a howl as he ran down from the battery to join them and dashed across the dock to the ship. The enemy had been so stunned that hardly a shot was fired as Meagher’s men climbed over the bodies on the gangplank to swarm over the ship.

USS PHILADELPHIA, INSIDE THE BAR, CHARLESTON HARBOR, SOUTH CAROLINA, 12:05 PM, OCTOBER 7, 1863

The USS Flambeau raced toward Charleston like a stormy petrel, the famous sea bird that races ahead of an ocean storm. She was one of the picket ships that Admiral Dahlgren had thrown out to sea to warn of the British approach. Dahlgren dreaded this moment. His orders to maintain the blockade against any attempt to break it had presented him with a deadly dilemma. He dared not sally out of the bar to meet the British, yet to remain inside the bar would mean that he in turn would be blockaded. That would end in inevitable surrender as coal and supplies ran out. He had had the foresight to intercept every coal and supply ship bound for the main operating base at Port Royal and keep them with him off Charleston. He had ordered the evacuation of as much of the stores at Port Royal as possible. At the same time the repair crews were working around the clock. He needed every fighting ship at Charleston. Everything that could not be repaired or carried off was to be destroyed.

Dahlgren had another reason as well for not abandoning his station off Charleston-the eight thousand troops under the command of Major General Gilmore who had been reducing the harbor forts on Morris Island. There were also four thousand of the Army’s troops garrisoning the Navy’s forward operating base at Port Royal. The Navy would never survive the shame of abandoning the Army.

As if Dahlgren had not worries enough, the need to protect the Navy’s most secret experiment also weighed heavily on his mind. He had been testing two small submersibles designed to remove underwater obstacles and to plant torpedoes (mines). These ungainly beasts could never be allowed to fall into British hands. He had orders to sink them if necessary in the deepest possible water. It occurred to him that the boats were not entirely liabilities. He had given much thought to the use of submersibles after having had the Navy’s first submersible, the Alligator, repaired at the Navy Yard when he was superintendent, and he had requested the construction of several improved models. Now, more than a year later, he had been given delivery of two such boats for trials in the harbor of Charleston. He ordered that the submersible tender and the two boats accompany his flagship. His interest in submersibles had become even more acute two days earlier when the Confederate semi-submersible, CSS David, had attacked New Ironsides with a torpedo. The explosion had rocked the ship, which had been protected by its thick iron hull and armor casemate. Although the David had escaped, his men had fished two prisoners out of the water who had prematurely abandoned ship. They had detailed plans of the boat in their pockets.

Only if the British came after him through the bar did he stand a chance of defeating them, Dahlgren thought. Even then, they only had to retreat, stand off outside the bar, wait, and starve him out. Defeat would only be delayed. Only a decisive defeat of the British and their retreat could save him, and that, given the huge force Milne had assembled at Bermuda, was impossible. For a man whose Navy life had been a continuous quest for glory, the logic of this conclusion was bitter beyond belief. He could only redeem the coming disaster by following the order of Captain James Lawrence of the ill-fated USS Chesapeake in its battle with the HMS Shannon in 1813-”Fight her till she sinks!”

Dahlgren knew that a large number of ships had arrived to reinforce Milne at Bermuda but not exactly how many and what types. All he had to go on was a London Times article of July that listed the ships of the Channel Squadron. That had arrived courtesy of Brigadier General Sharpe, someone Lincoln had mentioned in his letter as doing important work in organizing information about the rebels. Now it seemed the good general was throwing a wider net, something Dahlgren was thankful for. He desperately wished he knew how many and which of the huge Channel Fleet’s four ironclad screw frigates Milne was sending against him. There wasn’t an officer in the fleet who had not heard of the leviathans HMS Warrior and Black Prince, which were more than twice as large as his largest ship, the USS New Ironsides. The Defence class Resistance and Defence were both half again as large as the American ship. Though she was considerably smaller, she packed a greater punch than the British ships. She was armed with sixteen guns, fourteen of which were XI-inch Dahlgrens and completely outclassed the armament of the British ships. The American gun carriages and recoil systems were also far more efficient than those of the British models. Her armor was Warrior’s match as well. The British ships, however, had the speed advantage, able to move twice as fast as New Ironsides’s puny six knots.

The combat experience of the New Ironsides’s crew and those of the monitors would be a heavy weight in the scales of battle. Despite scores of hits from heavy Confederate ordnance, the New Ironsides emerged unscathed. The monitors’ combat experience against the harbor forts of Charleston had led to the introduction of a sheet metal inner sheathing to the turrets to prevent injuries to the crew from exploding rivets propelled by shot striking the outer surface.

Their twenty-foot-diameter turrets, with ten inches of armor in one-inch molded plates, were invulnerable to any ship-mounted guns in the world. Their hull armor was five inches, a half inch thicker than the New Ironsides and Warrior class, but the low freeboard meant most of the hull would be under water. Deck armor was only an inch, thus requiring the expedient remedy of a layer of sandbags. Designs of the Passaic class had called for twin XV-inch Dahlgrens, but production lags forced them to substitute one XI-inch. The turret was powered by its own small engine and could rotate 360 degrees in thirty seconds. Four iron beams in the deck served as slides for the gun carriages. “The slides would allow the guns to recoil a maximum of 6 feet, while the friction mechanisms could reduce the recoil to as little as two.” The carriages rested on brass rollers, so that large crews were not needed to run the guns out. Oval-shaped, armored gun ports swung open to allow the guns to fire and then were shut as soon as the guns discharged. Because the guns were muzzle-loaders, the long rammers had to be manipulated through the open gun ports. At such times, the turret would be turned away from the enemy, loaded, then turned again toward the enemy, and re-aimed.

This necessity was the greatest drag on the guns’ speed of fire, a problem the broadside ironclad did not suffer. The XV-inch gun in the monitor’s turret took an average of six minutes to fire, which could sometimes be reduced to a minimum of three. The XI-inch gun’s speed was about half that average. The broadside-fired Dahlgrens were another story entirely. The IX-inch could be fired every forty seconds, and the XI-inch every 1.74 minutes for about an hour. Comparing monitor and broadside ships, it was a trade-off between invulnerability and rate of fire.

There was no trade-off in punch. The XV-, XI-, and IX-inch Dahlgren shells with explosive charges weighed 350, 136, and 72.5 pounds, respectively. Their shot was even heavier, weighing in at 400, 169, and 80 pounds. The largest British shot, on the other hand, were the 110-pounder Armstrongs and the standard 68-pounder. Most British guns remained the venerable 32-pounders. Unlike the Armstrongs, the entire Dahlgren line was a byword in safety and reliability. The captain of the sloop the USS Brooklyn believed his IX-inchers to be well-nigh perfect and stated that “the men stand around them and fight them with as much confidence as they drink their grog.” Unlike most British guns, the Dahlgrens had been designed to fire both shell and shot, giving them a powerful versatility. Because of the Monitor-Virginia standoff the year before, Dahlgren had rigorously tested his guns against armor plate. He found that they could easily stand to increase their powder charges by 50 to 100 percent in order to easily drive holes through iron plate and wood backing of thickness and composition similar to the British Warrior class-“4- to 4.5-inch thick iron faceplate, bolted to about twenty inches of wood, sometimes with an inch-thick iron back plate, set up against a solid bank of clay. In most cases, the Dahlgren shot penetrated clean through the target and embedded itself deep into the clay bank, even with the target angled steeply as fifteen degrees.”

The exploding shell was all the rage in naval ordnance, and no gun delivered the destructive charge against wooden ships better than the series of guns Dahlgren had devised. Against ironclads, the shells were less effective. Dahlgren’s guns were equally able to deliver solid shot. Dahlgren had also taken to heart the error that had prevented the original Monitor’s XI-inch Dahlgrens from punching holes right through the CSS Virginia’s iron casemate. Navy policy had mandated that a powder charge only 50 percent of the maximum tested charge be used. Subsequent tests by Dahlgren showed that not only could his robust guns fully stand the use of a 100 percent charge for long use but that they would tear 5-inch armor apart. At the time, Dahlgren had been particularly incensed by the comment of the British First Lord of the Admiralty that his guns were “idle against armor plate.”During the Civil War two opposing schools of thought arose as to the best means of destroying armored warships. The “racking” school held that projectiles should smash against the ship, distributing the force of the blow along the whole side and dislocating the armor. Once the armor had been shaken off, the vessel would be vulnerable to shell fire. The “punching” school held that the projectile should penetrate the armor, showering the ship’s interior with deadly splinters in the process.… Dahlgren had concluded that racking was more effective against armored vessels than punching. Racking favored his low-velocity smoothbores over high-velocity rifled cannon.

Dahlgren had had the satisfaction in June of seeing the monitor USS Weehawken force the ironclad CSS Atlanta to strike its colors after hitting it at three hundred yards with only a few XV-inch shot. One shot alone dislodged the armor plate, sending a mass of iron and wooden splinters into the casement battery, spilling all the shot in its racks, and killing or wounding forty men. The prize had been repaired at Port Royal and was on the way to Philadelphia when Dahlgren intercepted her. He asked for volunteers for a scratch crew and captain and found himself with more than enough seamen and with a score of ambitious lieutenants who could smell promotion in the air. Of them he chose Lt. B. J. Cromwell.

As the Philadelphia was essentially unarmed, the admiral transferred his flag to the New Ironsides, from which he had commanded the previous attacks on Fort Sumter and the other harbor forts. His son, Ulric, had insisted on staying with the Navy rather than be sent ashore to join Gilmore’s troops. “New Ironsides has been in action more than any ship of the squadron. Where else would I be, Papa?” he asked. He had already hit it off with the ship’s captain, Stephen Clegg Rowan. An Irish immigrant, Rowan had joined the Navy in 1826 and fought “in the Seminole and Mexican Wars and had distinguished himself in the North Carolina sounds early in the Civil War.” Under his command, the New Ironsides became the most feared of all Union ships to the defenders of Charleston.

With Flambeau’s warning, a prearranged signal rocket from New Ironsides set the American squadron into motion. The lightest ships moved south to hug the shallow waters of the coast along Morris Island where the deeper draft British ships could not enter. These included eight steam gunboats, most of barely five hundred tons, and each armed with only a half dozen or so guns but sixteen of them Dahlgrens. He pulled his frigates and sloops inside the bar to join his ironclads.

The squadron had barely sorted out its formation when masts from at least a dozen ships dotted the horizon. Smoke plumes soon topped the masts as the engines were engaged. The inefficient engines gulped vast quantities of coal, and warships used sail as much as possible before switching to their engines for propulsion. Now that their objective was almost within sight, the British black gangs swung into work to stoke the fires that would give their ships that mobility and agility that sail could never match.

Finally, the last of the picket ships steamed through the bar to signal the flagship of the enemy’s imminent approach. One by one the masts increased until fifteen and more could be counted. The captain of the picket ship came alongside to report that he had counted four ships of the line, the rest frigates and smaller ships. The captain shouted through his megaphone, “But leading them is the biggest ship I have ever seen in my life, Admiral. She’s black from fore to aft. Must be the Warrior.” There was a stir on Dahlgren’s bridge among his staff, but the admiral’s face did not show a flicker of change. Captain Rowan just smiled. He had fought his ship and had the utmost confidence in her and her crew in battle. He knew the Warrior’s captain, or for that matter, the captain of most Royal Navy ships at this time, could not say the same.

In fact, the picket ship’s captain had been wrong. The great black ship he had seen was not the Warrior but her sister ship, the Black Prince, commanded by Capt. James Francis Ballard Wainwright. An able officer, Wainwright had commanded his ship for more than eighteen months and, as a mark of his ability, had served as second in command of the Channel Squadron. The squadron sailing toward Charleston was only the smaller part of Milne’s concentration at Bermuda. He shrewdly concluded that with the massing of the Royal Navys there was a clear indication that Charleston was its objective. The element of strategic surprise had never been realistic. He would have wagered to a certainty that the enemy knew the British were coming to Charleston. They already knew in Washington that the Royal Navy had seized Portland Harbor, though the town itself was still under siege. They were even more painfully aware that ships from Halifax were raiding the sea-lanes to New York and Boston. Their eyes were drawn north and south. It was toward the middle coast of the Atlantic seaboard that Milne was sailing with the bulk of his force-for Chesapeake Bay and the approaches to Washington and Baltimore. Admiral Cochrane had showed the way in 1814, inflicting great damage and even greater humiliation on the Americans by ravaging the shores of the great bay. Since they had seemed to have forgotten that lesson, he was determined to repeat it in such a forceful manner that it would linger and produce a national flinch whenever the thought of crossing the Royal Navy even occurred to them. Milne knew that the Union could never be physically destroyed, but it would give up the game if enough pain were inflicted. The second loss of their capital in less than fifty years would be a mighty weight dropped against the scales of their morale and will to fight.

He had wanted to trap the Americans inside the bar at Charleston and starve them out or destroy them when they came out to fight, but his plans had been countermanded by the Admiralty under intense pressure from the cabinet as well as the merchants of the great textile-manufacturing cities for immediate access to the millions of pounds of prime Southern cotton warehoused in Charleston. Factories were closing rapidly now in the second year of cotton starvation of Britain’s mills. The government had also concluded that full employment was a prudent counter to any lingering sympathy for the Union among the mill workers. Beyond this was the cabinet’s strategic calculation of the need to eliminate the Union’s stranglehold on the South. He was ordered to immediately break the blockade by destroying the American South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. The strong squadron led by the Black Prince was more than enough to sweep away Dahlgren’s little ships, overwhelm his frigate and sloops, and pound the monitors, admittedly at close range, into junk with their vastly superior weight of metal.

Milne had no choice. He would rely on his accurate long-range Armstrongs to do as much damage as they could before his ships closed with the Americans. The main effort would then be borne by the mainstay of the fleet, its 68-pounder gun. Milne had emphasized again and again to his captains who would go up against the American ironclads to close to within two hundred feet. The Admiralty reports indicated that only at that range would the 68-pounder be able to punch through American armor. It would be a matter of hard pounding at close range, something from which the Royal Navy had never shrunk.

HMS BLACK PRINCE, OFF THE CHARLESTON BAR, SOUTH CAROLINA, 9:30 AM, OCTOBER 8, 1863

Rear Adm. Sir Michael Seymour, commanding the strike against Charleston, may have shared Milne’s assurance that his force could make short work of the Americans inside the bar, but getting to grips with them was no easy matter. The normal prudence of a sailor and his experience in the blockade and bombardment of the main Russian naval base in the Baltic at Kronstadt during the Crimean War had confirmed to him the dangers of attacking through confined waters and into major estuaries. At the age of sixty-one and the son of an admiral, Seymour was about as experienced and competent a senior officer as the Royal Navy could produce. In the Kronstadt expedition, he had been second in command. After the war he had commanded the Royal Navy’s East Indies Station and destroyed the Chinese fleet in June of 1857 during the Second Opium War and had taken Canton. The next year he had taken the forts on the Pei Ho River, forcing the Treaties of Tianjin on China. He was made Knight of the Bath the next year and sat as a member of Parliament for Devonport since 1859. When the Admiralty had sent Seymour out with the Channel Squadron reinforcement, Milne found him the natural and politic choice to command the Charleston expedition. Dahlgren would be facing a fighting man.

The Southern pilots Seymour had engaged at Bermuda had assured him that Black Prince, on which he kept his flag, and his other deep-draft ships of the line and frigates would be able at high tide to cross the bar off Charleston. The bar was a great ridge of mud pushed out to sea by the combined flow of the Ashley and Cooper rivers that swept around Charleston and emptied into the harbor, flowing around Fort Sumter before they met the sea. It was like a great undersea parapet behind which the Americans safely sheltered except when the tide ran in twice a day.

In the morning Seymour could see Dahlgren’s ships across the bar. The large bulk of New Ironsides stood out in the middle of the American line. She was their toughest and largest ship, he had been informed, but less than half the size of Black Prince. Fore and aft of her floated four of the low-profile monitors, their black turrets more like bumps floating on the calm sea. In a parallel line behind them were the wooden warships, the frigates Wabash and Powhatan, and the three sloops, Pawnee, Housatonic, and Canandaigua. He was surprised to see so few ships-ten in all. There were supposed to be seven monitors, but the sharpest eye aloft could only count four: Lehigh, Montauk, Nahant, and Catskill. Seymour did not know that the remaining three monitors (Patapsco, Weehawken, and Passaic) had been sent to Port Royal for repairs.

A few smaller ships hung in the distance to the south, hugging the shore off Morris Island. Seymour took these to be the support vessels of the American squadron trying to stay as far away from the action as possible. The small submersible tender with its two boats was not in evidence, hidden behind the American flagship as Atlanta hid behind the bulk of the Wabash.

Seymour had to suppress a sense of elation that he had caught Dahlgren before he could concentrate his command. His Southern informants had provided detailed information on the strength and location of the almost eighty ships of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. Dahlgren’s command numbered more than eight thousand men scattered in ships up and down the Georgia and South Carolina coasts and at Port Royal and a few other enclaves in offshore islands. Not more than twenty ships were actually at Charleston. Almost thirty were at Port Royal, under repair or coaling. The rest were spread up and down the coast. What Seymour did not know was that Dahlgren had indeed been able to concentrate his sloops and frigates as well as the gunboats. The latter Seymour had mistaken for the support vehicles clinging to the shallow water of Stono Inlet off Morris Island. Their shallow drafts had allowed most to slip up the inlets and out of sight.

Seymour’s nineteen ships carried eight thousand men, or 13 percent of the strength of the Royal Navy, and mounted six hundred guns, the largest concentration of naval power the Royal Navy had committed to battle since Trafalgar. Seymour would have been even more encouraged had he known he outnumbered Dahlgren almost four to one in men. The American’s crews numbered not even 2,200 men manning 114 guns, but 90 of these guns were Dahlgrens.

The odds were with him, Seymour concluded. He paused to recite a passage from Thucydides. In the long days at sea as a midshipman, he had taken to heart the words of the Spartan king Archidamus II in the Peloponnesian War: In practice we always base our preparations against an enemy on the assumption that his plans are good. Indeed, it is right to rest our hope not on the belief in his blunders, but the soundness of our provisions. Nor ought we believe that there is much difference between man and man, but to think that superiority lies with him who is reared in the severest school.

His thoughts drifted back to those golden days of his youth when ships were all powered by cooperation of God’s wind and man’s sail and did not trail a smudge of dirty coal smoke. He also summoned another comment memorized in his younger days, an American quote at that. It was from their Adm. Stephen Decatur on his observation of one of the first steam engines to power a ship: “Yes, it is the end of our business; hereafter any man who can boil a tea-kettle will be as good as the best of us.”

Seymour brought himself back to the present. He walked over the deck, put his hands on the sun-warmed railing, took a deep breath, and looked around at the wide expanse of sea and sky and the wide mouth of the Charleston Harbor entrance. He could take unalloyed pleasure that the weather would not be another adversary this day. Only the lightest breeze stirred the air in a cloudless sky, a perfect early October day. There was just enough wind to carry off the smoke.

If he had any qualms about the coming battle it was over the safety of HRH Albert, the nineteen-year-old son of the Queen (and second in line to the throne), a newly promoted lieutenant aboard the corvette HMS Racoon, on which he had been serving since January. It was a general consensus in the captains’ cabins and crews’ quarters of the fleet that Albert was a zealous and competent officer, but he was also had an angry and rude personality. He earned no love beneath decks, where they called him “the King of the Greeks.” Just that year the Greeks, having disposed of their overbearing Bavarian royal line, had voted to make young Albert “King of the Hellenes.” Victoria had not been amused. It was enough though that Britain’s treaty obligations prevented a member of her royal family from ascending the Greek throne. The offer was politely declined.

Dahlgren was also thanking the weather for its neutrality. A heavy sea would have been a greater danger to his monitors than the enemy would be. They were hard enough to handle in calm water without rough weather swamping their decks. It was lost on no one that the original Monitor had sunk in a storm. His monitors needed flat seas to steady their ungainly shape and allow the twin heavy Dahlgrens in their turrets clear aim. The admiral, like his British opposite, also had a young man to worry about-Ulric was all energy, pacing awkwardly with his new cork leg up and down the deck. Dahngren suggested a place of safety in the upcoming fight. “Ullie, I want you to be with me in the pilothouse.”

Something flashed across Ulric’s eyes, but he softened it into a smile. “It will be more exciting with the Marines, Papa. I will just get in the way in that tiny pilothouse, and I am familiar with the gun drill of the Marine gun crews. You of all people should know how well I can get around a Navy gun. How many times did I practice with them at the Navy Yard?”

Dahlgren forced himself to tuck that worry away; the service was his life, and he owed it his complete attention. He had been in bad health for longer than a month now; it had deepened the lines of his already gaunt face. Now he summoned from the depths of will and duty every fiber of his ability for the supreme moment that was coming. Seymour was aware of Dahlgren’s pioneering work in ordnance, but it was a general sort of awareness that did not seriously contemplate how much that expertise might weigh in the coming fight.

THE BATTERY, CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, 3:05 PM, OCTOBER 8, 1863

It had not taken long for the word to spread through Charleston and its defenses that the British had arrived off the bar. The city emptied as people rushed down to the river and crowded the docks from the slave market all the way down to the Battery at the tip of the peninsula that held the city. The well connected found places in the balconies of the mansions that lined the Battery. From one of them, Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant de Beauregard had given the order to fire on Fort Sumter almost two and half years ago. That was the event that had triggered this grinding war. The little Louisiana Creole dandy ostentatiously chose the same balcony to watch the distant battle, though little more than smoke would be visible at the five- to six-mile distance. Now many were quick to hope that they might witness the end of that war from the same vantage. With him was Capt. Duncan Ingraham, the commander of the Charleston Naval Station. To his immense chagrin, he had nowhere else to be. The two Confederate ironclads under his command, Palmetto State and Chicora, were idled by engine repairs. Had that not been the case, nothing on this earth would have kept him from joining the upcoming battle.

The war had just about ruined Charleston. Hardly a blockade-runner got through Dahlgren’s ships anymore. The warehouses along the docks were crammed to the rafters with bales of cotton. The white brick warehouse at the end of East Ager Dock just south of the battery alone held thousands of bales of unrealized wealth as the paint peeled from its walls. Once the leading port for the export of the South’s “white gold,” Charleston’s economic life was near death; it was now plain shabby and its dwindling population increasingly threadbare and pinched.

It had become an article of faith among the people of Charleston that the mere arrival of the Royal Navy would practically usher in the Second Coming. They had pinned such hopes on foreign intervention to save them from Lincoln’s remorselessness that hope became faith and faith a dream.

CROSSING THE CHARLESTON BAR, 4:55 PM, OCTOBER 8, 1863

Seymour crossed the bar on the afternoon tide just as Dahlgren expected. He came in two divisions line abreast. The first division was led by the Black Prince followed by ship of the line Sans Pareil; the big frigates Mersey and Phaeton; the corvettes Racoon, Challenger, and Cadmus; the sloop Bulldog; and the gunboat Alacrity. The armored frigate Resistance, captained by William Charles Chamberlain, led the second division, followed by ships of the line St. George and Donegal; the big frigates Shannon, Ariadne, and Melpomene; the corvette Jason; the sloops Desperate and Barracouta; and the gunboat Algerine.

Just as Dahlgren expected, Seymour was determined to break the American line in the spirit of Nelson. Once the line was broken, his weight of fire could be used to overwhelm the American ships one by one. While the big ships broke the line in two columns, he would envelop the Americans as well with his sloops and corvettes. But what had worked so well for Horatio Nelson in 1805 against demoralized French and Spanish ships at Trafalgar was not as applicable in 1863 against experienced American ships whose crews were as instinctively combative and jealous of victory as their British kin. It would be hard pounding then, and Seymour’s ships had the great advantage in numbers and overall weight of metal.

The Americans’ ironclads in the first line were steaming slowly at a right angle to the approaching British; the monitors were lucky to do five knots. The two British columns were aiming to cut right through the American line. Seymour signaled to break the American line fore and aft of the New Ironsides. At two thousand yards the forward pivot Armstrongs on their lead ships opened an accurate fire, striking the New Ironsides and the turrets on several monitors. Seymour had directed that priority of fire to the ironclads. The excellence of British guns and gunnery were immediately evident. Unfortunately, they were completely without effect as their shot barely dented the American armor. Within minutes the vent piece from the Black Prince’s Armstrong blew out, silencing the gun.

As the range closed to eight hundred yards, the Dahlgrens opened up. The ironclads concentrated the fire of four XV-inch and twelve XI-inch Dahlgren guns on the Black Prince and Resistance in the lead. The Wabash and her sloops behind the ironclads fired over the decks of the low-slung monitors, with a broadside of another twenty-five IX-inch, one X-inch, and three XI-inch Dahlgrens as well as four 100- and 150-pounder Parrot rifles. The Wabash alone was a veritable spitfire. The huge frigate, at 4,650 tons, was larger than two of Seymour’s three ships of the line. It carried one X-inch and forty-two IX-inch Dahlgrens, one 150-pounder and two 100-pounder Parrot rifles, as well as a smaller 30-pounder rifle and one 12-pounder gun howitzer. Despite her wooden body, the Wabash contained a significant part of Dahlgren’s firepower that day.

The storm of American shells converged on the two lead British ships in a visible stream of black dots against the blue sky. Months of practice in bombarding the forts in Charleston Harbor had honed a precision accuracy in the ironclad gun crews.

Black Prince staggered under the hail of 350- and 136-pound shells; her bow and forecastle disintegrated. The casemate armor that protected the gun decks did not extend around the bow or stern. The shells had ripped and torn her metal hull plates down to the water line, and she began to drink in the sea in great gulps as her powerful engines sped her forward toward New Ironsides. But watertight compartments, one of her design innovations, limited the amount of water gushing through the smashed bow that would have otherwise flooded the entire ship.

Seymour’s flagship was about to experience the layered gunnery Dahlgren had instructed his captains to employ. As Black Prince and Resistance closed the distance with the enemy line, the American ships switched to solid shot to bear on the armored sides of the British ship. The large shot converged on both sides of the British ships. From within the 8-inch armored pilothouse on the New Ironsides, Admiral Dahlgren watched the huge shot arc over the sea or skip across the waves to ensure a crippling hull strike. It was the Atlanta all over again. The low-velocity Dahlgren shot ruptured the armor plates, detaching three-foot sections of the armor’s teak backing and inner metal skin in showers of wooden splinters and metal shards that wiped out whole gun sections. The concussion sent the shot flying from their racks within the casement. Here the design innovations of the Warrior class came to Black Prince’s aid. Her gun deck had been designed as a series of compartments with armored 4.5-inch bulkheads between them, limiting the damage done by each shot to single compartments.

By the time Black Prince broke the American line astern of New Ironsides, a third of her guns were out of action. The crews of the rest had not lost their nerve and fired accurately as she passed the American ship’s stern. The Royal Navy believed its 68-pounders were the only ordnance it had that would shatter armor plate but at no more than two hundred yards. Black Prince halved that distance, firing its starboard battery almost point-blank into New Ironsides, each surviving gun firing as it bore. The New Ironside’s unarmored stern crumpled under the impact, its rudder shot to pieces. But even at a hundred yards, the British shot just bounced off New Ironsides’s armored casemate. A subtle advantage to the American ship was its seventeen-degree outward slopping hull, which presented an angled instead of a flat surface to the British shot. Its armor had been forged rather than rolled, giving it even more strength than the usual plating. Coupled with the strength of the casemate, the angle deflected the British hits with wild, deep, echoing clangs. The monitor Catskill swung its turret to follow Black Prince and fired both of its guns into the larboard battery as the enemy passed, wrecking another fighting section.

At almost the same time, Resistance cut across New Ironside’s bow, raking the latter as her guns bore. She then passed Wabash and fired into her stern. Resistance had suffered almost as much as Black Prince in its race to close with the enemy, and its crew now worked like men possessed to even the score. The fighting spirit of the island race was never keener as they worked the guns.

Attempting to follow Resistance through the American line was St. George. Her wooden bow and forecastle simply disintegrated from the explosive power of the shells converging on it. Shells spread havoc down the quarterdeck, turning it into an abattoir of blood and shattered bodies, its captain dead and wheel shattered. In a moment this venerable ship of the line, with its three gun decks counting 120 pieces of ordnance, had been stunned. But she plunged on, her screws spinning and pulling to starboard in the absence of the wheel’s control. Her gun crews hauled away the dead and wounded and fought the fires that seemed to have ignited everywhere. The ship was now pulling unintentionally parallel to the American line, and for the first time she could fire back. The crews rushed to their larboard guns and fired as they bore. Her guns were accurate at this range, and the British gun crews, oblivious to the carnage on the quarterdeck, fought like demons, their famed gun drill taking charge, their motions fluid and powerful like the piston arms of powerful steam engine. Yet their skill and courage were wasted as the shot just bounced off the ironclads whose turrets had reversed to reload.

Inside the turrets, the gunners felt the continuous concussive effect as a heavy vibrating hum. The turrets on the monitors Catskill and Nahant rotated back to fire at close range into St. George. Behind them, Wabash’s heavy Dahlgren battery added its fire. St. George seemed to fly apart in clouds of wooden splinters under the impact, huge holes smashed into her sides, her masts crashing down over the sides. Wasbash’s broadside battery kept the fire hot as the monitors rotated their turrets to reload. One by one, then by whole sections, St. George’s guns fell silent amid their dead and dying crews, blood washing the decks. As her engines took her out of the fight, she was more a floating wreck than a fighting ship.

Black Prince now turned slowly hard to starboard to bring it broadside to broadside with the crippled American falling out of line. The Warrior class ship was especially difficult to steer with any precision given its small rudder, and the American ship had time to prepare for the next round. The little submersible tender was barely able to steam away from New Ironsides, its submersible boats nowhere in sight. Following Black Prince, ship of the line Sans Pareil also turned to starboard to sandwich New Ironsides and pound her to pieces between them. The American ship was now dead in the water as the battle split into two parts. The monitors ahead of Dahlgren’s flagship steamed on, engaging HMS Donegal and its following frigates, which were steaming into the same pulverizing hail of shells that had wrecked St. George.

From behind Wabash, the ram Atlanta emerged to swing wide and come in against the British 2nd Division line. She bypassed HMS Donegal, which was engaging the American line to aim squarely at HMS Shannon. This huge British frigate was the namesake of the ship that had taken the USS Chesapeake in 1813 and with its fifty-one guns approached the size of a small ship of the line. Her gunnery was as good as her renowned ancestor’s, and she sent a stream of iron at the former Confederate ironclad that repeatedly struck her bow and sides. Atlanta steamed on, her smokestack shot away and her broadside guns useless at that angle of approach. Lieutenant Cromwell, barely used to the title of captain, was intent on closing with the enemy and put his reliance in the ironclad’s spar torpedo. The gunpowder-filled torpedo extended beyond the prow just under water, its barbed point invisible in the muddy water around the bar. Shannon’s broadside of fifteen 8-inch shell guns and ten 32-pounders poured their fire into the oncoming ram, but they burst or bounced off her plate.³⁶ The frigate had only one gun, a 68-pounder that could hope to defeat even Atlanta’s inferior armor, and it had only one shot as it closed the last hundred yards. It was a direct hit that that knocked the top off the pilothouse and killed the young captain. It was too late for Shannon, however; Atlanta itself now was the weapon. She crashed into Shannon, driving the spar torpedo point deep through the ship’s copper bottom and pushing the ship out of line.

Atlanta’s engineer ordered engines reversed, but the spar torpedo was sunk too deeply into Shannon, and the underpowered Confederate engines did not have the strength to pull it free. The torpedo man hesitated; his orders had been to connect the battery that would send the current into the explosive after the ship had disengaged. Shannon’s guns were firing at top speed at the immobilized ironclad. Atlanta’s bow gun was dismounted by a direct hit through its gun port. Now HMS Ariadne came up alongside to pound her with her broadside. Her expert gunners sent 68-pounder shot through Atlanta’s single broadside gun port, dismounting the gun and savaging the crew. The third frigate, Melpomene, came up as well to hammer Atlanta’s stern. The patches in her armor failed as shot penetrated the casemate, killing the torpedo man and wounding the engineer. The casemate was filled with smoke and screams as the armor plate rattled with shot and more shells exploded inside. The engineer crawled over to the torpedo man. Pushing the body off the battery, he made the connection. He fell back and counted-one, two, three-then the underwater force of the explosion surged back through Atlanta, pushing her back. Shannon shrieked as if in pain as the explosion ruptured her engine and broke her keel. An enormous hole sucked in the ocean. Almost immediately she started to list. She died fast, slipping beneath the water in minutes.

Many a man paused to stare at Shannon’s death. HRH Albert was not one of them. If anything his sharp tongue lashed the gawkers back to their duties aboard HMS Racoon as it led the smaller ships of the first division in the envelopment of the American right. His captain was so intent on the last ships in the American line that he did not notice the flotilla hugging the coast to the south. He had no idea the initiative had slipped from his fingers until an XV-inch shell landed amidships. The lookout that should have seen them was flung into the sea as the mast he was atop flew apart in a cloud of splinters. Another huge shell and then another arced toward the corvettes. Against wooden ships, Dahlgren’s shells smashed their way into the gun decks before exploding with such force to create shambles and a butcher’s yard.

Albert scanned the shore but could see only the faintest shapes close to the water. He scampered up the rigging to give height to his glasses. “By God,” he muttered to himself, “more of those damned monitors.” They were the three monitors whose repairs had been rushed forward at Port Royal, and they were slowly moving toward the corvettes. The second monitor shell to strike Racoon stove a great hole in her hull. The third killed the captain and sent Albert in a bloody heap on the shattered deck. Fires broke out to feed on the mass of new kindling, and the ship began to list strongly. Strong hands lifted the prince down into a boat. Despised or not, he was still Victoria’s son, and Racoon’s tars would not have it said they left her boy to die.

On the other flank the British envelopment had run into Dahlgren’s swarm of gunboats, which were rapidly closing on the main fight. There HMS Resistance had picked out USS Wabash for its duel as the largest American ship after New Ironsides. The two were pounding away at only fifty yards, the side of each ship spitting tongues of fire. Resistance’s heavy nineteen-gun broadside battery had a target it was designed for, a traditional wooden warship. Her gun crews were rapid and accurate. Big chunks of Wabash’s side and deck were smashed, but her own broadside battery of seven XI-inch Dahlgrens and a 150-pounder Parrot gun were just as destructive to the armored hull of the enemy. So close were the ships that Wabash’s shot was breaking through the ruptured armor and followed by a shell to explode inside the gun deck.

In effect they had canceled each other out, but the fighting would go on until they had reduced each other to wrecks. Meanwhile, the American sloops Pawnee and Housatonic closely engaged Resistance’s other side. Her gun crews had been so winnowed that there were few to man the guns on that side as the sloops concentrated on holing her below the water line. Shot after shot had so dislodged and torn the armor plates and shattered the teak behind them that water began to fill compartment after compartment.

The center of the battle swirled around the two armored flagships as Black Prince finally came alongside New Ironsides again. Seymour had seen the shot bounce off New Ironsides and was determined to lay himself alongside, where his gunners could fire through the enemy’s gun ports. Black Prince’s Captain knew his business and was getting everything from his ship and crew that they had to give. It was bruising and bloody work, for the American captain also knew his job. Wainwright would have to earn this victory the hard way.

Nevertheless, Wainwright knew he had the advantage. As damaged as his flagship was she still had complete maneuverability while the Ironsides was dead in the water. Huge projectiles sailed back and forth between the two ships, smashing through plate and wooden backing as Black Prince steamed past slowly, so close as to sometimes grind its casemate against the American’s. At this distance, New Ironsides’s gun crews switched to shell, set at point-blank range with all three lead fuse settings torn off. They not only tore through the armor and backing but ignited the splintered wood as well. Here and there guns went silent as the crews rushed to fight the fires. Black Prince was answering slowly to the helm with her flooded bow acting as a dead weight. Turning about, Wainwright was engaged by the sloops Canandaigua and Powhatan but, he shook off their fire to reengage New Ironsides.

Admiral Seymour would have her. And in his single-mindedness, he tried to step into Wainwright’s shoes and forgot the rest of his squadron. He had wounded New Ironsides, and now he was in for the kill. His spirit would have soared if he knew how close he was. His 68-pounders had battered New Ironsides’s pilothouse so severely that a chunk of metal had detached from the inner wall and struck Dahlgren a great gash in the thigh, sending him crashing into the bulkhead in a spray of blood. Rowan was first at his side to staunch the bleeding. It was a nasty wound. The deck pooled with the old man’s bright blood. When at last it ebbed, Dahlgren lay ashen on the deck. Rowan ordered him carried below, but the older man gasped as three seamen lifted him. His hand clutched at the captain’s coat. “Rowan, keep pounding. We can stand it longer than they can. Pound ’em. My guns won’t let you down.”

On the spar deck Ulric Dahlgren was with the Marines manning one of those very guns-a 5.1-inch Dahlgren rifle. He had applauded the accuracy of the men with that piece and had been as admiring, albeit more ruefully, of the accuracy of the British Armstrong gunners on Black Prince’s own spar deck. Their guns stopped one by one, whether hit or not, and the Dahlgren muzzle-loading rifle continued firing. Ulric had unconsciously hobbled up to take the place of a crewman felled by a splinter. By then the men had no time to spare for the bizarre scene of a one-legged Army colonel feeding the guns just like a tar. The gold eagles on his shoulder straps were more than incongruous. They attracted the fire of Royal Marine riflemen. The deck splintered around him, and rounds pinged off the gun. Another man fell to writhe on the deck. All the Marines aboard, not manning guns, had been issued the Spencers Admiral Dahlgren had so presciently ordered. Their volume of fire quickly dropped the enemy’s Marines from the rigging and forced those on deck under cover.

By now Captain Wainwright had brought Black Prince alongside New Ironsides again. Young Dahlgren saw an officer through the smoke shout through a megaphone, “Do you strike?”

Ulric hobbled to the side, his cap blown off and his blond hair streaked with powder. He cupped his hands and replied as the son of an admiral, “The Navy never strikes!” His Marines cheered. He looked back at them and winked, then turned to shout across the water again, “And neither does the U.S. Army!” Amazingly, the Marines cheered again, delighted with his pluck, Army or no Army. The gunner fired to punctuate their approval.

Aboard Black Prince, the officer was blown off his feet, his clothes shredded and his megaphone sailing over the other side of the ship. He got up and staggered to report back to Seymour in his armored conning tower. The admiral looked at the man’s glassy eyes and singed and torn uniform, and asked, “Well?”

“They said the U.S. Army refuses to strike, sir.”

Seymour blinked and said, “What did you say?”

“They said the U.S. Army refuses to strike, sir.” Then he fell over.

Before Seymour could try to make sense of this, his flag captain, Arthur Cochrane, interrupted with the damage report from Black Prince’s captain. It drained away much of his confidence. More than half his guns were silenced. The armored casemate was torn and rent the entire length of the ship. The men were fighting fires in a half dozen places. The upper decks had been swept with exploding shells until it was a shambles. The American sloops were steaming back forth, pounding the exposed side of the ship and forcing it to fight in two directions.

For Seymour, the whole battle had telescoped into the struggle between these two ships. Whoever triumphed would win the entire battle. It all rested on that. “Put her alongside, muzzle to muzzle, and we shall fight it out, Captain. Be prepared to board,” he told Wainwright. The cry went out to assemble boarding parties. Seymour did not flinch as the two ships lurched into each other with a grinding squeal of metal on metal that would have frightened hell. The gun crews had been so worked up to the fighting that they barely took note of the eerie noise that echoed through the gun decks.

The only thing that kept the guns in action was New Ironsides’s seventeen-degree outward slant of her hull. Otherwise, the opposing hull would have shut the gun ports and the guns would have been unable to be run out. Locked in death’s embrace, the two ships fired and fired-the British gunners now had open gun ports, small as they were, to sight through only yards away-gutting each other and smashing the opposing gun decks until only a handful of guns functioned on either side. For the British boarding parties waiting expectantly for the impact, the noise went straight through them, their hearts pounding in the few still seconds before the order to board was given. “Board!” They raced to the side and threw their grapples to snag the enemy. A few made it over the yawning gap made by the American hull’s slant, but the boarding parties were stopped at the sides, unable to leap across so wide a space. Massed on the side they made too good a target for the U.S. Marine sharpshooters. Concentrated fire into the tight groups of sailors and Marines dropped a score and drove the rest under cover.

Inadvertently New Ironsides’s gunners solved the stalemate by shooting through Black Prince’s mizzenmast. It screamed as it splintered, then with a groan fell over the side and onto the Americans’ deck. Ulric instantly saw it as a bridge. He scrambled to the mast, pulled himself up by the strength of his arms and good leg, then forced his leg under him to rise to a standing position. He did not dash over the mast; rather, he hobbled almost crablike, dragging and swinging his cork leg after him. Yet the young man who had danced across the dance floors of Washington with such grace summoned every last bit of that coordination and control to pick his way across that rounded, splintered, and rope-twisted mast. If he had been able to pay attention he would not have been able to tell which group of men was more incredulous at the sight-the British manning the stern Armstrong pivot gun or his own Marine gun crew. Finally reaching the enemy’s side, he let himself down onto his good leg and sagged from the impact. He was on the deck of Black Prince. He barely had time to look up and see the gleam of a bayonet with a red coat behind it rushing toward him.

Oblivious to the drama on the surface, the admiral’s two small submersibles had waited for just this moment for Black Prince to close. Their torpedoes bulged at the end of long spars. Finding the ship through the glass ports in the light filtering down from the cloudless sky, they made gentle contact with the iron hull with the strong magnet on the end of the torpedo. Once the torpedoes were locked onto the hull they backed off, unraveling the electric wires that connected with batteries inside the boats. Before the wires went completely taut, the circuits were closed.

Ulric had barely drawn himself up. The Royal Marine’s bayonet was plunging toward his chest when the deck heaved, throwing him onto one of the Armstrongs. The gun crew had been thrown off their feet as well and were just getting up when the deck heaved again. An awful groaning came from deep within the ship.

Installed low in Black Prince, her engines had survived the hard pounding as her gang stoked the forty furnaces feeding the ten boilers that generated the steam for its 5,210-horsepower engines. But the torpedoes had struck where the Dahlgrens could not reach, bending the shaft and rupturing some of the furnaces. Burning coal, white-hot ash, and clinker spewed out among the stokers, who screamed out their last moments in hell. Water rushed in through the torn hull, flooding the engine rooms as the guns above continued to fight. When the seawater reached the boilers, they began to explode.

The ship’s death agony was not yet apparent to the men on deck getting to their feet. The tars were game and came for Ulric again. He had drawn his Navy Colt and dropped the first two men. A third struck him a numbing blow on the shoulder with a rammer; the pistol fell from his hand. The tar drew back to brain him, but he went down under the rush of men in blue coats. Ulric’s own Marines had followed him over the mast armed with cutlasses and pikes from the ready racks. He was pulled to his feet by strong arms.

On the bridge, Captain Wainwright was desperately trying to reach the engine room through the metal voice pipes and the mechanical telegraph connected to it. The shrieks at the end of the voice pipe told him the worst. Everyone in the conning tower had been frozen listening to the death below. The shudders that pulsed up through the deck from the exploding boilers jarred everyone back to life. Wainwright knew his ship was lost. He found Seymour had slumped into his chair. “Admiral, Black Prince is mortally wounded. She can do no more. I must save the men who are left.” Seymour’s jaw set in a vise as the ship groaned in its death throes; he could only nod.

Wainwright left the conning tower to personally haul down the colors, an act he would not delegate to a man of lower rank. He made his way through the shambles on the spar deck. He could feel the ship beginning to settle under him as it listed to larboard. The smoke from the guns and a dozen fires on the deck hid the stern in its wispy black arms. He made out a group on the stern around the pivot gun and was about to order them to abandon ship, when the breeze quickened to part the smoke. They were not his men.

The officer among them was a young, fair man, leaning against the gun. A man raised a pistol to shoot, but the officer knocked it up to discharge in the air. The officer straightened up and touched the muzzle of his own pistol to his forehead in salute. “Colonel Dahlgren, United States Army, sir.”

Wainwright was a hard man to fluster, and even this scene could not break through the iron presence of a naval officer. He touched the brim of his cap, “Captain Wainwright, commanding Her Majesty’s Ship Black Prince, sir.”

As the deck began to cant even more, Dahlgren coolly asked, “Do you strike, sir?”

“Damnation, sir. I do.”

SOUTH AGER DOCK, CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, 7:32 PM, OCTOBER 8, 1863

For more than two hours the crowds massed along the battery and the Charleston docks had been barely able to control their excitement. They could not actually see the battle six miles away beyond Fort Sumter and Morris Island, but they could hear the continuous rumble of the guns and see the pall of smoke. It was more than just gunpowder smoke. The funeral pyres of great wooden ships go straight up into the heavens. Signals from Fort Sumter added little.

That changed as the signal officer at Beauregard’s side read the waving flags from his telescope. His voice shaking he said, “Sumter reports a huge British warship is sailing into the harbor.” That could only mean that the British had won the naval battle. The arrival of the ship was the act in international law that would declare the hated blockade broken. Those on the crowded balcony spontaneously shouted in triumph. Word was shouted down to the street and spread with electric speed. The crowds erupted in near hysterical cheering, with rebel yells keening over the water. Beauregard announced that he would personally welcome the ship at the Ager Dock, and he bounded down the stairs, his staff running after. He shouted an order to have the Army Band meet him there.

Charleston’s cheering crowds were the last thing on the mind of the captain of the Resistance. With most of his guns out action, a third of his crew dead or wounded, and his hull filling with water from the ruptured waterline armor, Chamberlain knew he had three bad choices. He could continue to fight his few guns and go under, he could try to make it to Bermuda and go down in less than ten miles, or he could break off action and take his ship into Charleston and probably go under before he reached a pier. If he was lucky, he could run it aground or dock it where it could be saved. Seeing Black Prince strike instantly decided his mind. His engines were still game; the water had not reached them yet. There was a good chance he could make the five miles to the city. The Housatonic pursued but sheered off when she came under the fire of the Confederate harbor forts.

As he approached Fort Sumter, he could see the cheering garrison lining its rubbled walls, and a tug emerged from around the masked side of the island and chugged toward the Resistance, blowing frantically on its whistle. Thank God, Chamberlain thought. The Resistance would need all the help it could get. She was slowing down; the water filling the hull was a drag on the engines. The tug kept blowing its whistle, and Chamberlain could see figures on the deck waving their arms frantically.

Resistance was finally within hailing distance of the tug when she hit the mine. The ship shuddered. Chamberlain could hear the scream of twisting and snapping hull plates from within the depths of the ship. Still the engines thundered to keep Resistance moving. He shouted into the speaking tube to the chief engineer who reported that the engine compartment was secure but that the water was quickly rising to the level of the boilers. He could not guarantee how much longer he would dare leave the black gang in the stokehold. “Give me everything you have got, then get the men out.” He turned to one of his officers. “Start getting the wounded up on deck. I don’t want them down there if we founder and sink.”

The tug carefully made its way alongside. Its master paled at the buckled and gouged armor plate and the shredded upper deck. He read the ship’s name and shouted up, “God bless you, Resistance! Can I be of assistance? You must beware of the mines. Let me guide you in.”

Chamberlain bit his lip at the warning that had come only minutes too late. He yelled over the side, “Yes, thank you, sir. I have severe damage below the water line and am taking water fast. We will throw you a line.” The little tug’s engine exceeded its safety limits as the line went taut, trying to help pull the six thousand-ton warship. Thick black smoke gushed from its funnel.

On South Ager Dock, Ingraham’s telescope had been to his eye for ten minutes. He said to Beauregard, “There’s something wrong, General. Very wrong. I think the ship is in great distress. It entered our minefield and then stopped and has now taken a line from our tug. I fear it has struck one of our mines.”

Beauregard felt his elation wilt under the implications of that statement. He could only watch over the next painful half hour as the great black ship slowly approached the dock, plainly getting lower and lower in the water. Its battle damage was easily apparent even to the crowds on the dock. A pained silence hung over them. As the ship inched closer, someone in authority had the presence of mind to order room for the dockhands to secure the lines that would be thrown down to them. Soldiers pushed through the press to form an honor guard. More came to line up behind Beauregard and Ingraham and to make a way for the dozen black dockhands.

At last she edged up to the dock, a great wounded beast, her naval ensign still whipping in the breeze. Everyone saw the marks of her struggle. Her magnificent figurehead, a neoclassical carving of a savage warrior with busy dark head and beard, was gouged and splintered. The silence of the crowd melted away in a rising mutter. Then the band struck up “God Save the Queen,” the honor guard came to attention and presented arms, and the people started to cheer their long-prayed-for and gallant ally. The lines were thrown from Resistance.

Chamberlain missed the honors. He was below, personally ensuring that no wounded man had been left behind and that the engine spaces and stokehold had been emptied of his crew. The water was coming up around him as he stood on the ladder above the stokehold.

His engineer grabbed him by the collar and heaved him up. “There’s no one else, sir. She’s dying, and you don’t need to die with her.”

Chamberlain gave one last look as the water bubbled and swirled up the ladder around his feet before leaving. They had barely emerged on deck when the ship gave its death cry, a deep groan swallowed by the sucking noise of rushing water. The crowd went deathly silent again at the ship’s death rattle. Then, in the sight of God and Charleston, the Resistance went down.