Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History (5 page)

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

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

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

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

Yet the thought of an open-ocean voyage and the excitement of New York pushed thoughts of geopolitics from Midshipman Rimsky-Korsakov’s mind. He was intrigued by the squadron commander, whom he watched walking the bridge of the
Nevsky
. Adm. Stefan S. Lisovsky was a seaman to be reckoned with by all accounts. He was notorious for his irascible and ungovernable temper. Nikolai remembered a lieutenant telling the boys as Lisovsky’s appointment was announced, “Do you know what they say of him? In his last command, in a fit of wrath, he had rushed up to a sailor, guilty of some offense, and bitten off his nose!” The lieutenant crossed himself, “Dear God, it will be an interesting voyage. At least, you will be comforted, my boys, to know that the admiral felt badly enough about the nose-biting to get the poor man a pension.”
⁷

Nikolai rubbed his own nose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stanton was trying to make sure Lincoln heard no more of it either, but later the President brought the subject up again and asked how Meagher was doing. Stanton huffed that the Irishman had lost interest. Lincoln was surprised and replied, “Did you ever know an Irishman who would decline an office, or refuse a pair of epaulets, or do anything but fight gallantly after them?”
⁹

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

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

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

He was commanding a gunboat squadron on the Nansemond River in late April during the Suffolk campaign. Lt. Gen. James Longstreet and his 1st Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia had been sent there to counter an expected Union offensive fueled by reinforcements. When the reinforcements were sent elsewhere, he converted his defensive mission to an offensive one to cut the communications of the twenty thousand Union troops in the Suffolk area. He had to cross the Nansemond to do it. On the morning of April 14, Lamson was taking the USS
Mount Washington
down the river to Suffolk when he was engaged by a Confederate battery at Norleet’s Point. The first enemy salvo blew up his boilers, and the ship began to drift ashore under heavy fire. Another of his vessels pulled him off the shore, only to ground the
Mount Washington
in crossing the bar. Another ten pieces of enemy artillery and hundreds of riflemen opened up at 11:00
AM
. He fought them from his stationary position on the bar until 6:00
PM
. He reported later that

her boilers, cylinders, and steel drums pierced and ten shells went through the smoke pipe, and the rest of the machinery much damaged. Her pilot house riddled, wheelropes shot away, and her decks and bulwarks completely splintered, everyone who has seen her says there has not been another vessel so shot to pieces during the war. The flag-staff was shot away, and when the flag fell into the water, the rebs cheered exultingly; but they did not enjoy it for long before we had the dear old stars and stripes waving over us again, with everyone more determined than ever to fight them to the last timber of the vessel.
¹⁰

Followed by a master’s mate and seaman, Lamson climbed through the wreckage to the upper deck. They hauled up the flagstaff by the
ensign halyards, raised and lashed it to the stump. He considered it a miracle that they all survived unscathed, only one of many miracles that seemed to fall on that ship amid the rebel shot and shell. “After the action was over, the sailors gathered around me on the deck, took hold of my hands and arms, threw their arms around me, and I saw tears starting from eyes that had looked the rebel battery in the face unflinchingly.”
¹¹

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

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