Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History (33 page)

Then they showed why British infantry had maintained such a reputation over the centuries. They charged. The crimson and blue lines collided in that great rarity in military history. Bayonet charges rarely resulted in melees. Either the attacker flinched at the sight of an unbroken enemy, or the defenders panicked and took to their heels. But now it was bayonet and rifle butt and pistol in a stabbing, clubbing mob. British bayonet battle drill was deadly as the men operated in wedges of threes. The best bayonet man was at the apex in the center while his companions supported him from the sides. The Maine men knew a thing or two about
the bayonet as well, but this time they were not crossing blades with the exhausted and thirsty 15th Alabama.
²⁵

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

By then, the Splashers and Maine men had pulled away from each other, dragging their wounded after them, and glared in silence as sweat-soaked chests heaved. The irresistible force had met the unmovable object. Chamberlain was clear sighted enough to realize that it was time to go. If the enemy’s reinforcements he could see approaching were as tough as the shrunken redcoat band in front of him, his force would bleed to death on this field. Under the fire of his batteries, he ordered a careful retreat back to the Portland militia line. At least he could put the creek between him and the enemy. Chamberlain was the last man off the field. He paused long enough to throw a salute with his saber to the shrunken ranks of the Splashers before galloping off.
²⁶

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

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

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

The reports of the British burning Albany ran ahead of the refugees and along the wires throughout the Union states. Coupled with the invasion of Maine and the initial report of the fall of Portland, the effect was stunning. New York City, the nation’s great emporium and financial center, seemed to shut down with the British Army less than a hundred miles away up the Hudson. Boston was no less afraid. Both feared a simultaneous assault from the sea, all the more real after the Royal Navy’s pursuit of
Kearsarge
into the Upper Bay itself. The wires to Washington burned with lurid tales of invasion as every governor with a northern border and every mayor within two hundred miles begged for massive reinforcements. This was worse than Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in the summer for there was no Army of the Potomac nearby ready to dog the invader and bring him to battle.
²⁸

However, there were men of courage.

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

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

Milne’s combined force now assembling at Bermuda was the strongest in sheer power that the Royal Navy had ever assembled. Many of these same wooden ships had only been converted to steam since the Crimean War. Moelfre Bay had imbued both officers and below decks with a righteous cause, though few bothered to consider that the Americans might describe the action as just desserts.
²⁹

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

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

The telegram was addressed to Sgt. William McCarter. He opened it expectantly.
MICHAEL STOP PUT ON THE BLUE STOP REPORT TO ME IN NEW YORK STOP MEAGHER
. His eyes moistened. “Katie, he needs me again.” Memories welled up of the man he considered a paragon of manly and martial virtues. The memories of Meagher’s intemperance flitted over his mind as well and fell away, as McCarter saw him again on the fields of Antietam and Fredericksburg, always at the front in the thickest fire and framed by the regimental Green Flag of Ireland and the Stars and Stripes, or nursing the wounded in his own tent, wrapping them in his own blankets as he sat with them through the night. McCarter had come to know Meagher better than any other enlisted man and most of his officers. As a guard assigned to his tent, he had saved a besotted Meagher from falling into the fire. In gratitude, Meagher assigned him to his own headquarters and discovered his considerable administrative talents.
³⁰
McCarter finally broke from the arms of memory to shout, “Woman of the house, shake the mothballs from my uniform!”

At that very moment, Meagher was standing in a wagon in the streets of New York, holding in thrall a crowd of thousands of his fellow Gaels. Many of them had taken part in the riots only a few months before, diehard Democrats who would not fight for the Union. All that was swept away when the Royal Navy had entered the Upper Bay and especially now that the redcoats had followed them to this new land, hovering to strike from barely a hundred miles up the Hudson Valley. Many had accepted the new land and worn the blue, but many had not and nursed the resentments of poverty. The British hammer had now forged ancient grievance to new affection for the land that sheltered them. Their ambivalence had burned away. They were ready to fight.
³¹

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.
¹

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.
²
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.