Lt. Col. Charles Langely, commanding the Peacemakers, was more than anxious after the Navy had started a bonfire whose dull red eye glowed even through this horrendous fog. The essence of a coup de main is stealth and silence, and now they had neither. He had hoped to be in control of the city as it woke to the morning and present its citizens with an accomplished fact that common sense would force them to accept. Now, thanks to the Navy, all would be chaos. He could not see but could hear the Dromedary pulling away from the wharf to pick up the Royal Marines at Ft. Gorges as a further reinforcement for Langely’s command. “Thank God,” he murmured to himself. “There are almost no troops in the town.”
There were only 112 men left in the 3rd Maine after it had watered the fields of Pennsylvania with its blood, but they double-timed up York Street as if they were the full thousand men that had left home two years ago. They turned right on Maple and crossed Commercial Street, which put them on the edge of the docks between Deakes and Brown’s wharves. Even through the fog, the activity could be sensed and heard more than seen. The colonel stopped them only long enough to fix bayonets. The watchmen lifted their lanterns and pointed down the street to Smith’s Wharf. Then he led them forward. Shots rent the fog; the colonel fell, but the 3rd Maine kept moving. Shouts in British English cut through the night. More shots came and more men pitched into the gutter. When a picket line emerged from the fog, too close to run, too few could survive the moving blue column that stabbed with bayonets and struck with rifle butts. The column broke onto the Smith’s Wharf as the British firing line cut loose. The first blue ranks fell, but the rest broke into a run over the short space and closed with the Peacemakers before they could reload. Now it was man to man. The gunpowder and technological revolutions of the time disappeared as men fell into the ultimate savagery with bayonets and rifle butts, teeth and bare hands.
More companies of the 1/16th rushed into the fight as they clambered onto the wharf while the 4th and 5th Maine pushed in from the town. Soon the entire fog-blanketed wharf was a seething mass of fighting men with so little room that only pistols were of any use. There was no time or space to reload a rifle. Once fired, it became a spear.
There were no tougher professionals in that age than the British infantry, but even their toughness was no match for the veteran courage and rage of the Maine men, whose homes had been violated and their women and children murdered. The outnumbered redcoats were being pushed back down the wharf as bodies carpeted the planking or fell off the sides into the water. Lieutenant Colonel Langely’s body was among them as it slipped beneath the murky harbor water. He would become a legend in the history of the regiment, likened to Horatio at the bridge. No Army but that of the British can wring so much glory and inspiration from a death. With two bayonet men on either side, he had fought in the front rank with rifle and bayonet, prodigiously lethal in his own right. There was very little scope to command with men packed so tightly on a narrow front. At that moment, an example was all the command his men had needed. He had finally gone down in that blur of bayonets and crack of pistols as the Maine men shoved them back and back again.
The rear American companies peeled off left and right to fire into the enemy on the wharf. They were joined by the 5th Maine Battery, which sent canister into the British and into the boats clustered at the end of the wharf. A British corvette, HMS Pylades, steamed up to fire into the struggling mass but killed as many of its men as the Americans it cut down. The battery turned its guns on the ship, sweeping the decks this time with case shot, killing the captain and helmsmen, and leaving its upper decks a splintered shambles.
The Peacemakers, mixed with naval ratings and Marines, were backed down the wharf, step by step, begrudging every bloody inch until the last of them were clustered at the end of the wharf as dawn began to burn off the last of the thinning fog. The corvette had drifted away, its engines now holed by a solid shot from the battery. Three hundred fifty-three were left of the nine hundred British who had set foot on the dock. Their backs to the water, the Dromedary gone, and their boats smashed, they fought on. Suddenly the fighting stopped. Both groups just stood there on the planking strewn with dead and dying men, mingled equally in Union blue and Her Majesty’s crimson. Ten feet of silence separated the panting, blood- and sweat-soaked groups. The inner fires banked. An officer in blue stepped forward and demanded their surrender. A sergeant in red threw down his rifle, for there was not an officer on his feet; then the others followed. But the battle for Portland had only just begun.
CAMP MORTON, INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA, 4:15 AM, SEPTEMBER 30, 1863
Two hours before dawn when most of the guards at Camp Morton slept, the three thousand men inside the prisoners’ barracks were awake. The word had gone out after midnight to rouse the men in silence. In the officers’ section of the camp, John Hunt Morgan waited more intently than any of them. It was to him that Hines had sent word. He had shared it with only three of his officers, but at his command the camp had quietly stirred itself. He would have taken heart in these early hours suspended between night and day when courage is weakest if he had known that of the thousands of expectantly waiting men there was one who had clutched a camp-made battle flag, the square-shaped stars and bars, that he had painstakingly assembled from what bits and pieces of colored cloth had come his way. Such flags, “the damned red flags of rebellion,” had quailed many a Northern heart in the past. This one was waiting to do so again.
A prisoner of war camp is designed to keep people inside; the eyes of the warders are focused inward and not outward. Of all the three hundred guards, only two had their eyes on the countryside outside the camp. They had not been under military discipline long and had not acquired a healthy fear of falling asleep at their posts. They did not notice the column of men shuffling along the empty road that led past the outskirts of Indianapolis to the camp. It was a great shame. They were missing an artful demonstration of military deception. A few men in Union blue rode at the head of the column of shabbily dressed men and a few more walked along the column with bayoneted rifles. At the rear rumbled six wagons.
Had the camp’s guards been awake, they would have seen a detachment of new prisoners under guard. The column came to a halt in front of the gate. Their breath rose in little clouds in the chill air. Big Jim looked down and smiled like a wolf. The country boy guards were soundly in the arms of Orpheus. As Jim was shaking his head, two of the guards in the column brought two prisoners forward, wrapped in blankets. They too, for an incredulous moment, stared at the sleeping guards in the light of the single lamp hanging from the guard post. Grenfell snickered, “We really must commend the sergeant of the guard after this.”