Dahlgren immediately ordered the assembly of his squadron off Charleston. The repair crews at Port Royal were ordered to bend every effort to get the three Passaic class monitors there in the repair yard back to sea and on the way to Charleston. Welles had warned him that the British might make an attempt to break the blockade at Charleston or Wilmington. Dahlgren had no doubt it would be Charleston even if Wilmington was a more active and successful port for blockade-runners. The war had started here, and here is where the Navy kept its heavy punchers. He was ordered to give battle and under no circumstances abandon his station. It was obvious that he could not meet the Royal Navy in deep water. His slow monitors would be at the mercy of the faster-sailing British ships, and his purpose-built frigates and sloops and gunboats would be overwhelmed by the firepower of ships of the line. He concluded that the advantage would lie in forcing the British to operate in the shallows, where their deep-draft ships would be at a disadvantage. He must have warning that the British were coming, and to ensure that, he scattered his lighter, fast ships across the path the Royal Navy would have to take from Bermuda. He wondered what measures the commanders of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron off Wilmington and the forces in Hampton Roads based at Norfolk would be taking.
Admiral Milne had given serious thought to those questions as well. Around him from the bridge of his flagship, HMS Nile, he could see the largest and infinitely more powerful fleet Britain had sent into battle since Trafalgar. The four huge ironclads surged ahead, the sharp spearhead of the fleet, followed by ten ships of the line and fifteen frigates, sloops, and corvettes. Behind them trailed a flotilla of supply ships. For their common objective along the South Carolina coast another squadron of four ships of the line and eight smaller ships had just departed the main force for its rendezvous with the transports carrying the four thousand men of the West Indian garrison of Barbados and the other islands.
Milne was thinking several moves ahead, which is why his thoughts turned to the enemy’s naval forces at Wilmington and Hampton Roads. Beyond them was the broad mouth of the Chesapeake, leading to the enemy’s capital, which was captured and burned in a similar foray by his predecessors in 1814. To repeat the feat within forty-nine years would surely make the Americans choke on their insufferable pride. He would iron the smile right off their faces.
First he would have to deal with Dahlgren’s force at Charleston. And of that force, he was fully apprised of its numbers, strengths, and weaknesses. Except for the monitors, Dahlgren had few ships that could match any of his, certainly not his ships of the line. Even the monitors, he thought, were overrated. His captains, on port visits to the Northern states and among their forces at sea, had heard the same complaints-monitor duty was unpopular, the conditions were brutal, and, of course, there was no opportunity for prize money, something the British naval officer could fully understand. But he did not underestimate John Dahlgren. The American’s reputation stood very high in the Royal Navy for developing his remarkable series of guns. Already he was called the “father of American naval ordnance.” Milne, however, chose to emphasize the fact that Dahlgren had had only eight years at sea and never commanded anything of this size or complexity. Even with the vaunted monitors he had not been able to subdue the defenses of Charleston Harbor. Fort Sumter, though beaten into a rubble pile, still stood defiant, as did the forts on the two opposing shores of the harbor.
WEST POINT FOUNDRY, COLD SPRING, NEW YORK, 9:20 AM, OCTOBER 5, 1863
The “deep-breathing furnaces, and the sullen, monotonous pulsations of trip hammers” of the great cannon West Point Foundry at Cold Spring, were much on their minds of two men. This greatest iron foundry in the world was producing hundreds of the U.S. Army’s splendidly accurate Parrot rifled cannons a year and close to a million shells. As accurate as the British Armstrong but more reliable given its muzzle-loading design, this gun was an insurmountable advantage for the Union that the Confederates could only lag behind. They could only acquire such guns through capture or by importation of a very few British Whitworth rifled cannon, a poor substitute for Vulcan’s workshop on the Hudson.
Lincoln himself had toured the huge facility early in 1862, walking through the mud as delighted with the raw power of the technological wonder as any boy at the circus.Lincoln watched 100-pounder and 200-pounder Parrott rifles hurl their heavy shells thousands of yards through a gap in the highlands to the precipitous banks of “Crows Nest,” while the deep clamor of gunfire echoed back from the hills like the roar of a great battle. Afterwards, he tramped delightedly about the plant, regardless of mud and rain. Raised a few inches from the ground on sleepers were bars of iron four inches square and sixty feet long, ready to be heated red-hot and coiled around mandrels by machinery. Near by, Lincoln saw these coiled bars welded by a great trip hammer, turned down, reheated and shrunk onto guns-forming the bands which were the trademark of the Parrotts. His face felt the heat and dazzle of the foundry where the guns were cast. He looked on as they were bored, rifled, turned and polished. And in another building he watched workmen turn out Parrott shells, distinguished by the brass expanding ring for taking the rifle grooves. Before Lincoln left Cold Spring, he had had seen about all there was to see in the making of rifled cannon.
Three days after Lincoln left, the first batch of guns was shipped to Major General McClellan, who was fighting on the approaches to Richmond. But it was not the great pieces that Lincoln saw at the testing range that armed so many of the field batteries of the Union field armies. It was the 10- and 20-pounder medium and heavy field guns. The latter, posted on Little Round Top, had cut long, gory furrows through the ranks of the Virginians and North Carolinians who had marched to glory and slaughter in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. One shot alone brought down almost fifty men.
This beating fiery heart of the Union war effort was much on the minds of two men as Albany’s funeral pyre sent its smoke down the Hudson River Valley. British raiding parties steaming down the Hudson or striking nearby cities were scorching the ability of the Union to make war. Barely ten miles to the north of Albany, Schenectady, a growing industrial city of ten thousand, was the first to feel the enemy’s hand. British troops marched into the city to destroy the Schenectady Locomotive Works, which had already produced eighty-four superb locomotives for the federal government’s war effort. Thirty miles south of Albany, the thriving river port of Hudson was the next target because of the Hudson Iron Company’s ironworks. It was also the country’s major inland refining and distribution center for whale oil. All it took was one overeager Canadian militiaman to throw a torch into one of the warehouses filled to the ceiling with refined oil. The fire exploded the building, sending flaming jets of whale oil through the air and flooding down streets. Its magnificent opera house was quickly wreathed in flames as the liquid fire licked up the walls. Soon the entire town was ablaze, and a huge pall of black, greasy smoke floated down the valley.
Maj. Gen. Lord Paulet’s orders, courtesy of Wolseley, had included a red-line paragraph to send a raiding party downriver, if practicable, to destroy the foundry at Cold Spring. With Watervliet Arsenal a gutted ruin, Paulet’s appetite had been whetted. A guards’ officer did not normally think in terms of destroying the enemy’s industrial base, but he did often think of fame. And Wolseley had spent a great deal of time exciting Paulet’s ambition by explaining how well this stroke would be received in England, where the idea of the world’s greatest foundry being in America did not sit well at all.