Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History (6 page)

The
Nansemond
was as trim and well run as any ship that flew the Stars and Stripes, all shipshape and Bristol fashion, as the petty officers said. The old salts had already taken the measure of this young man and threw the weight of their goodwill on his side and set the tone for the ship. They whispered that he was Davy Farragut all over again and for good reason—he was Navy through and through. Lamson knew his job and everyone else’s. He was a teacher, vital in a navy that had ballooned from five thousand to fifty thousand men in two years. It did not take long for the word to spread that the
Nansemond
was a hale ship with a lucky captain who plucked fat prizes off the sea.

A good-looking but not striking young man, with his carefully combed and slicked-down black hair, Lamson looked younger than his years—something he did not appreciate when a captain’s maturity was a
given attribute of his ability. He grew a mustache and a goatee to make him appear older. Officers and men did not seem to care. There was something about him that compelled a willing obedience, something hard to put your finger on. It went beyond his considerable competence. His presence seemed to generate a certain excitement in others who wanted to be around him. He was like an electric current that caused others to glow. He was also a fighter, and men follow such a man.

He was also lovesick. Every mail packet would carry a handful of his letters to his cousin and fiancée, Kate Buckingham. The ahoy had found him at his writing desk, where he had just had time to write, “Dear Kate, Again the
Nansemond
is dashing through the water, and

Again on the deck I stand
Of
my own swift gliding craft
”
¹³

before leaping through his cabin door and racing up the gangway to his quarterdeck.

Porter handed him the eyeglass. “The vessel is running offshore, a blockade-runner for sure.”

“Let’s give chase, Mr. Porter. Stand to intercept. We shall see what our new engines can do.”

The
Nansemond
leaped through the sea like a hunting dog on the scent. By noon, she had gained so much on the vessel that Lamson opened fire on the chase, and the shots fell just short. The sextant reading told him they were gaining, when a strong breeze from the southwest came up to whip the sea into heavy swells. The
Nansemond
slowed as the waves struck under her low guards, but the quarry suffered the same handicap as well. Lamson pressed on, straining his engines to close the distance. The next two hours saw him gain. The pursued began to throw cargo overboard to lighten its load, but the
Nansemond
continued to close until 3:50
PM
when a shot from her bow gun shattered the vessel’s figurehead. The vessel came about to signal her surrender.

She was the
Margaret and Jesse
, seven hundred tons, registered in Charleston and bound for Wilmington from Nassau. Lamson sent two officers aboard to hoist the American flag. With a prize crew in control of the captured vessel, Lamson cut a course for the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron off Wilmington, and when everything was secure and under way, he returned to his cabin and picked up his pen to finish his letter to the fair Kate.

The next morning in the early light the ships swung in among the squadron. Lamson, at his breakfast, was interrupted by a knock on the cabin door. “Enter,” he said.

A tiny cabin boy, all of eleven years old, stood owl-eyed for few seconds until he blurted out, “Mr. Porter’s compliments, sir. Flagship signaling.”

Lamson put his breakfast aside and went topside, nodding at Mr. Porter as he scanned the squadron bobbing in the sea. Most were converted merchantships like the
Nansemond
, meant to run down blockade-runners. There was also a handful of the purpose-built, prewar, steam-driven warships. As powerful as the squadron was, Lamson knew its strength paled compared to that assembled under Adm. John Dahlgren’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron off Charleston. Admiral Dahlgren had command of the Navy’s new iron fist, all eight of the new iron monitors. Riding low in the water with their great double-gunned turrets, the
Passaic
class monitors were a marvel rushed to production after last year’s great duel on in Hampton Roads between the USS
Monitor
and the CSS
Virginia
, but not a one of these wonders bobbed here off Wilmington.

“What is the signal, Mr. Henderson?” Lamson asked the acting ensign. He had been lagging in his signal recognition skills, and Lamson had had him at practice in every spare moment.

Henderson blinked, read the signal flags, and then said quickly, “‘Captain
Nansemond
report squadron commander immediately,’ sir.”

“Very good, Mr. Henderson.”

“Traitor!” The speaker spat out the word, a letter clutched in his hand. But it was his eyes that glowed with hate. Big Jim Smoke was a hater by nature, but now he had a cause.

The Copperhead rebellion could not succeed by merely hamstringing the war effort—it must succeed by an act as overt as the rebels firing on Fort Sumter, and for that they needed arms. Tens of thousands of small arms and tons of ammunition were siphoned off the open market to fill secret arsenals, but even that was not enough. Raids on federal arms warehouses followed.

Such as the one on this warm summer’s night.

Their target was the arms warehouse, one of many that fed the rail yards of Indianapolis, which poured arms and supplies south to the armies that had finally starved out proud and obdurate Vicksburg. Thirty men
slid through the shadows. Wagons waited deeper in the gloom. Two o’clock in the morning is a dangerous time for sentries and in particular for these men who were members of the Invalid Corps, the light duty men released from the charnel house hospitals as unfit for field duty but able to do some valuable service. In these early hours a man could be seduced into the sleepy arms of Orpheus. It was burden enough to nurse a limping leg from a minié ball at Chancellorsville or Champion Hill without struggling also against leaden sleep.

The man with the letter had tucked it and his anger away. He had work to do but had to wait while others did their own work. He stepped around a corner to be out of sight and lit a match to his cigar. The guards did not stir from their sleep as shadowy forms scurried through the lamplight. A few practiced motions, and the guards slumped to the ground, cut throats gushing black blood in the pale light. The wide double doors swung open with a creak, and the gang rushed in. A lamp waved back and forth down the street to summon the wagons.

“You see,” Big Jim Smoke said to the young man who had joined him, “how easy it is.” Felix Stidger’s handsome, pale face had not even twitched when the guards were killed. Calm, self-control was the shield and buckler of a good spy, and Stidger was among the best. An ardent Unionist, Stidger had enlisted and served in the office of the Provost Marshal General of Tennessee. He had volunteered to infiltrate the Copperhead organization in Indiana and had succeeded beyond his wildest hopes. With great charm he had ingratiated himself so well with Dr. Bowles that he had been appointed the group’s corresponding secretary, and the information flowed to Washington. Now, though, beneath that placid exterior he was worried. Big Jim and his gang should have been caught in a trap.

Big Jim instead reached into his pocket and pulled out the letter. “Looking for this?” he sneered. Stidger’s eyes widened only a bit as he heard Smoke’s pistol cock and felt the muzzle stab into his belly. “You, of all people, should have known that we are everywhere, even the post office. And you mailing so many letters, and the Army making so many raids on our hidden weapons and making so many arrests.” He pressed the muzzle deeper into Stidger’s belly. “And now, if you please, we find this one, telling about this little raid of ours.” He grinned, his incisors gleaming in the lamplight, wet and wolf-like through his beard. He gave the muzzle another shove. “What gets me is how you got Bowles to trust you. But then he is too much the trusting fool. From the first, you weren’t right by me.”

“Come to your senses, Big Jim.” Stidger’s voice was about as even as Smoke had ever heard. “Of course, I wrote it. They think I work for them, and I give them just enough truth to make me believable. I am working under Vallandingham’s instructions.” Smoke was listening, he could tell. He had captured his attention by dropping the biggest name in the Copperhead movement. Now he had only to play it out and make him doubt. “Look at the date, man. I wrote that the raid would be on the twelfth not the second. Check it.” Stidger was counting on the split second distraction for Big Jim to look at the letter again in which to draw his own pistol. Instead, Big Jim pulled his trigger. The bullet’s sound muffled in the young man’s middle. It severed his spine as it spewed blood and bone out behind him in fiery tongue, and he fell like a rag doll.

“Good try, traitor. But if you had meant the twelfth, you should not have written the second.” The light had not entirely gone out of Stidger’s eyes when Big Jim kicked him in the face. He paused long enough to wipe his bloody shoes on the corpse and then crossed the street. By then, most of the five thousand new Springfield rifles had been loaded into the waiting wagons and were disappearing into the gloom.

The greatest of the great white sharks made the cold waters off the Cape of Good Hope their home. These primal killing machines now had competition from an even deadlier killing machine, man. The CSS
Alabama
was an iron-hulled steamer, 220 feet long and 32 feet across her beam, three-masted, and bark-rigged with powerful engines that sent her sleek hull through the water at thirteen knots. Six gun ports pierced each side. She was circling her helpless forty-fifth victim, a small Yankee bark,
Sea Bride
, close inshore. The entire population of Cape Town had decamped to the shore to watch the spectacle of death on the water. A reporter for the
Cape Argus
described the hunt.

The Yankee came around from the southeast, and about five miles from the Bay, the steamer came down upon her. The Yankee was evidently taken by surprise.

Like a cat, watching and playing with a victimized mouse, Captain Semmes permitted his prize to draw off a few yards, and then he upped steam again and pounced upon her. She first sailed around the Yankee from stem to stern, and stern to stem again. The way that fine, saucy, rakish craft was handled
was worth riding a hundred miles to see. She went around the bark like a toy, making a complete circle, and leaving an even margin of water between herself and her prize.
¹⁴

There was more than a little glee mixed in with the excitement. The sentiment in this colony of the British Empire, on which the sun never set, reflected the mother country’s political prejudices as closely as they parroted the latest fashions—contempt for the Yankees and admiration for the Confederates. Cape Town’s elite was already in competition to invite the
Alabama’s
captain, the famous Capt. Raphael Semmes, into their homes. To the rage of the U.S. consul, the city prepared to fete the captain and his officers even before the
Alabama
had made its kill.

The Confederate commerce raider finished toying with its prey and sent over a boat to fetch its captain and his sailing papers. The defeated captain climbed aboard stone-faced, his life in ruins. He owned his ship; it was his home as well as his livelihood. Semmes greeted him cordially before reviewing his papers. The
Sea Bride’s
captain observed him as he read. Semmes was a thin, wiry man, all sinew and determination. His already famous waxed mustache protruded at right angles for three inches from either side of his face.

Semmes looked up. “I declare the
Sea Bride
a prize of war, Captain. I will send a prize crew to take her. You and your crew I will land in Cape Town.” The man held no hope of escape; his manifest clearly declared his cargo of machinery to be the property of American merchants. What sickened him though was the thought that Semmes might burn her, his home of so many years, as the captain of the
Alabama
had done to so many whalers. Their oil-soaked timbers had created vertical infernos floating on the sea, visible for great distances, and had become a specter haunting every American ship’s captain. The
Alabama
had hunted for less than a year, and already she had spread terror through the American shipping world, driving insurance rates skyward and giving owners no alternative but to reflag, sell their ships to foreign owners, or face ruin at sea. Bit by bit, Semmes was breaking Yankee commerce on the high seas.

The world was already putting the praise of the
Alabama
to song in a dozen languages. As Semmes sailed into Cape Town Harbor, the locals were already singing in Afrikaans, “Daar kom die
Alabama
, die
Alabama
kom oor die see.” It would become a local legend that would endure for more than one hundred years.
¹⁵

Gus Fox was not the sort of man to wait on events much less on other men. The assistant secretary of the Navy was a burly, powerful man, with a bushy mustache-goatee that bristled with power. He bent events to his will as the foundries did that shaped the great flat slabs of armor plate into the rounded turrets of his beloved Monitors. On this day he was waiting for one man as he paced the Navy Yard’s Anacostia River dock, and a naval lieutenant at that.

Whenever Fox appeared at the Yard, a primal energy was unleashed. Adm. John Dahlgren, during his time as superintendent of the Yard, had had the self-confidence and connections with Lincoln to withstand and guide Fox’s enthusiasm. But his successor, Capt. Andrew Harwood, was not as well connected and knew it. He would pay Fox the courtesies his dignity allowed and then get back to his own work and leave the Assistant Secretary to whatever had brought him to the Yard. Fox understood the game and played it well. Being the brother-in-law of the Postmaster General and the son-in-law of a major figure in the Republican Party had been the trick that landed him the job. That he was uniquely qualified for it was not something that American patronage politics encouraged, but this time it had hit a bull’s-eye.