Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History (7 page)

Everyone knew that Gideon Welles was the Secretary of the Navy. Everyone also knew that Fox
was
the Navy. Secretary Welles stuck to policy and left the conduct of actual operations to Fox, who had the complete confidence of the officer corps. He was, after all, one of their own. A
former naval officer, he resigned during the service doldrums of the 1850s, but the war had drawn him back like a magnet.

In late 1860, as the issue of war or peace had hung in the balance and the new President and his cabinet struggled with whether to relieve Fort Sumter, Fox had figured out the how and threw the plan into Lincoln’s lap. It was hardly his fault that the relief expedition he accompanied had arrived in Charleston Harbor just as the Confederates began the bombardment of the fort. Fox had the dubious honor of escorting the surrendered garrison home. That experience only fueled his aggressive and energetic nature. He had suggested and organized the first important naval success of the war by seizing Port Royal in South Carolina and turning it into the Navy’s forward operating base without which the blockade could not have been maintained so far south.

Lincoln had been overjoyed that the Navy had pulled such a beautiful rabbit out the hat when most news had reeked of bitter frustration and failure. If Dahlgren was close to Lincoln, now so was Fox. He had piled high his credit with the President with his enthusiastic support of John Ericcson’s famous
Monitor
and especially of the follow-on class, the
Passaics
. Those ships formed the fighting core of Dahlgren’s force off Charleston. Another larger class of shallow-draft monitors, the
Casco
class, was now abuilding along the Atlantic coast and along the Ohio.

Fox was not one to hoard his credit. He wagered it freely on new games as they came up. He was ruthless and arrogant, but admirals had more to fear from those features than lieutenants did. He was also an instinctive fighter, seized new ideas and opportunities, and could size up good men in a snap.

One such man was on the bridge of the
Nansemond
gliding up to the dock. Fox liked such men and gave them bigger and bolder commands. There were plenty of commands to go around in a navy that had mushroomed so quickly in size—and not nearly enough bold and lucky men to take them. The evidence of that lucky boldness was the prize trailing behind Lamson’s
Nansemond
. She was the British blockade-runner, the
Margaret and Jesse
. Lamson had caught her off Wilmington, where his luck had blossomed. He had come across her low in the water with a heavy cargo of lead—those deadly accurate Whitworth breach-loading rifled guns and enough ammunition to keep them firing for years. The weight of her cargo had been her undoing. Built as a British mail packet, the iron-hulled, side-wheeler
Margaret and Jesse
was the only ship afloat able to do sixteen knots, but slowed by the greed of her cargo,
Nansemond
had fallen on her like a hawk.

Lieutenant Lamson knew Fox by sight. Any aggressive officer among the blockading and river fighting squadrons along the Atlantic coast was sure to have met Fox. As the ship came alongside the dock, Fox took the time to examine the sleek ship coming up to dock outboard of
Nansemond
. Then his eyes moved to the bridge and locked on Lamson’s.

“Captain, come ashore immediately. I must speak with you,” Fox’s voice boomed. Lamson bounded down the gangplank as soon as it hit the dock. He took Fox’s extended hand and found the older man was trying to crush it as he grinned at him. Lamson smiled back and met grip with grip until Fox let go. “Good to see you again, young man. A fine prize.” He looked thoughtful for a moment and said, “You may not have seen the last of her.” He motioned to the carriage nearby. “We must hurry. You are wanted at the White House.

The lieutenant saluted. “Colonel Sharpe?” he asked the officer who had just stepped off the train car. George H. Sharpe was on the short side of medium height, round shouldered, and with a walrus mustache, a plain, even homely looking thirty-five-year-old man and not a very martial figure by any means. He was a man you could easily miss—until he spoke, that is.

“Lieutenant, I am Colonel Sharpe.” The young man was taken aback at the transformation. Sharpe’s face had brightened with a disarming smile and his blue-gray eyes sparkled with good humor.

“I am to take you to the White House, sir, by direction of the Secretary of War.”

Sharpe reflected that life was getting more and more interesting as the carriage clattered down Pennsylvania Avenue. He had been summoned by the iron-willed Secretary to Washington with no explanation from his staff position at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac at Brandy Station in Virginia, the furthest point of the Army’s advance after Gettysburg. He had met the formidable Edwin McMasters Stanton before. His duties had taken him to Washington repeatedly before Gettysburg, and he had briefed Stanton any number of times. He knew that the Secretary of War was a force of nature, single-minded will personified. Stanton had come to national prominence shortly before the war when he had defended Dan Sickles for shooting his wife’s lover dead right outside the White House and won the case by advancing the
insanity defense for the first time in American legal history. Because of those briefings, Stanton had acquired a taste for what Sharpe had to say.

Sharpe, a slope-shouldered man from Kingston, New York, was unique in any number of ways. He was a Hudson Valley aristocrat, sophisticated and cosmopolitan. He was one of the best-educated men in the country, with degrees from Rutgers and Yale Law School. He had been the chargé at the Vienna legation and was something of a linguist, fluent in Latin and French. His mousy exterior gave no indication that he liked to have good time. A connoisseur of fine food and wine, he was not above staggering back from the Irish Brigade’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration tight as a tick. He also had a mind as sharp as an obsidian razor.

When Joseph Hooker had blown into the command of the Army like a cleansing wind, Sharpe had been his inspired choice for something new. Hooker had been that transformational man who had leapt out of an old paradigm into the new. With a taste for the value of military intelligence, he had experimented with various collection means as a division and corps commander. When he became Army commander, he did something unique. Heretofore, commanding generals had been their own intelligence officers, a role that had worked for great commanders like Washington when armies were small. Hooker saw that the scale and complexity of modern war had made it impossible for any single man to both command an army and control its intelligence operation as well.

For the latter task he chose Sharpe. At Fredericksburg, he had seen Sharpe decisively sort out a muddle on the field. A regiment of French immigrants had milled about in confusion, unable to understand the order of their non-French-speaking colonel. Sharpe rode over from his own 120th New York (NY) Volunteers, gave the orders in parade ground–loud perfect French, and the regiment moved smartly into line. Hooker had called Sharpe in for an interview and showed him a French book on how to create a secret service. He asked if he could translate it and how fast. Sharpe replied, “As fast as I can read it.” When he did, the job was his.

Sharpe had taken this new ball and run with it. He created a fully functioning intelligence operation—the Bureau of Military Information (BMI)—practically from scratch. He assembled a contingent of hardy and clever scouts, developed a spy network, and established interrogation, document exploitation, and order-of-battle operations. Hooker had given him carte blanche, which he used to coordinate the other intelligence
collection means of the cavalry, Balloon Corps, and Signal Corps. He also established contacts throughout the Eastern Theater of operations that often took him to Washington and Baltimore. His efforts had presented Robert E. Lee “the Incomparable” to Hooker on a silver platter in April, the most magnificent gift of intelligence in the war. However, at Chancellorsville early the next month Joe Hooker had lost faith in Joe Hooker, and all of Sharpe’s efforts went for naught.

Hooker’s successor, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, had listened to Sharpe at Gettysburg and not flinched. It was Sharpe’s report on the night of July 2 that had convinced Meade to stay and fight it out on the third day of the battle. It was also Sharpe’s special operation raid the morning of the same day that had snatched dispatches to Lee from Jefferson Davis that laid bare the Confederacy’s defensive strategy and force deployment in the East. Stanton was so elated that he poured gold into the hands of Sharpe’s chief of scouts, the sandy-haired Sgt. Milton Cline, who had personally seized the dispatches. Yes, Stanton knew Sharpe.

Now Sharpe was pondering the reason for his cryptic summons. He considered the possible sources in the reports he had forwarded to Washington. Almost everything had been a running account of Lee’s movements, strength, logistics, and possible intentions. There was nothing really special or earthshaking there, just patient building of a picture of the enemy and the daily effort to keep it current. Although Stanton absorbed everything like a sponge, his interest had shown no special emphasis in the month since Gettysburg except for the case of a contraband named George.

George, a Confederate officer’s servant, had come through the lines only last week. He bore a strange tale, one that normally was outside Sharpe’s area of responsibility. Cline had come to see him, “Colonel, you should talk to this boy, yourself.” And he did.

The boy was obviously intelligent. His astute observations confirmed much of what Sharpe’s office already knew, a vital cross-checking feature of intelligence. It was the normal order-of-battle information, but George had more to say when Cline nudged him and said, “George, tell him about the white folks up north.” He then told a tale that made even Sharpe’s eyes widen.

As Sharpe mused in his carriage, Fox’s and Lamson’s carriage was also moving down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House. Fox chewed on his cigar briefly between sentences. He was too active a man to endure long silences. “These Confederate commerce raiders are gutting our merchant navy, ruining our international commerce, and driving
people whose livelihoods have been destroyed into the arms of the people who want this war stopped.”

Lamson watched the man’s body language radiate hostility. Fox went on, “They’re as serious a threat as the blockade-runners that keep the rebels alive with the bounty of Her Majesty’s foundries and arsenals.” He looked at the ruin of his cigar with disgust and tossed it out the window. “And, I’ll tell you straight out, Lamson, that we are on the losing end of the fight at both ends. We are just not catching enough blockade-runners, and even when we catch one, Semmes and his infernal
Alabama
seize two of our ships. A losing game, a losing game.”

Lamson had not been discouraged by Fox’s venting. Rather his interest had been piqued. It was not every day that a junior naval officer received an invitation to the White House. Within Fox’s lament, Lamson could smell opportunity for something grand. It was with a delicious sense of anticipation that he followed Fox into the White House.

Charles Dana, the assistant secretary of war and Fox’s counterpart, was already in the anteroom chatting with an Army colonel. He saw Fox and said, “Gus, let me introduce Col. George Sharpe. Colonel, this is Gus Fox whom I’m sure you’ve heard of.”

Fox sized up Sharpe and was not impressed as they shook hands. “Dana here speaks highly of you, Colonel, don’t you, Charlie?” Sharpe’s handshake was firm, not what Fox expected from such a nondescript-looking man. Then Fox was as taken aback as the lieutenant at the railroad station had been by the transformation of Sharpe’s face. There was power there. He remembered to introduce Lamson, who found some comfort in the presence of another officer in this otherwise intimidating setting of the Executive Mansion, even if it was an Army officer three grades his senior. Fox and Dana drifted off to a corner to talk, leaving the colonel and the lieutenant to their thoughts.

Upstairs the cabinet was meeting with the President. The room in which they regularly met was austere, the only decorations being a large series of maps on one wall and on the other an old engraving of Andrew Jackson and a small framed photographic portrait of John Bright, a man Lincoln admired immensely. Bright was a member of the British Parliament whose impassioned support of the United States in its struggle had earned him the derisive title of “Member from the United States.” At times he seemed to be the only member of the British establishment who took up the cause of the Union. His powerful antislavery message resonated more with working- and middle-class Britons than with the ruling and business classes whose palpable disdain for the Union was returned
with a bitter resentment by the Americans. Establishment Britain anticipated a Southern victory with undisguised glee. That was not lost on the men sitting at the table. A recent centerpiece for the table, a jagged piece of shell, had been presented by Meade after Gettysburg. It had been fired by a Whitworth breech-loading rifled cannon presented as a gift to the Confederacy by the London Chamber of Commerce.
¹

Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward, held the floor. He was the man who informed opinion acknowledged should have been president and was probably the most distinguished man in the country before the war. He had been governor of New York and a senator thereafter. The 1860 nomination of the new Republican Party seemed his for the taking, until the Log Splitter from Illinois carried off the prize from under Seward’s enormous Roman nose. That was not the first time he had underestimated Lincoln. When the new president sought the best men for his cabinet, he turned to Seward to be his senior cabinet officer. Seward thought at first that that position gave him license to determine policy for the unsophisticated lawyer from the West. When he got over his shock that Lincoln would be his own man and was quite capable of it, their relationship settled into one of mutual respect and even friendship. Seward was a man without political rancor and served to the best of his considerable ability. For that reason, he did not object when Lincoln made Thomas Haines Dudley the U.S. consul in Liverpool. Dudley was the Connecticut politician whose support had swung the Republican nomination away from Seward to Lincoln. The appointment was more than a political reward; Lincoln had placed an able man in a sensitive post, which Seward did not fail to recognize.
²