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.
However, there were men of courage.
ROYAL NAVY DOCKYARD, IRELAND ISLAND, BERMUDA, 2:00 PM, OCTOBER 1, 1863
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.
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, 2:20 PM, OCTOBER 1, 1863
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. 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.
11
THE WAR DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C., 11:50 PM, OCTOBER 1, 1863
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.