With Flambeau’s warning, a prearranged signal rocket from New Ironsides set the American squadron into motion. The lightest ships moved south to hug the shallow waters of the coast along Morris Island where the deeper draft British ships could not enter. These included eight steam gunboats, most of barely five hundred tons, and each armed with only a half dozen or so guns but sixteen of them Dahlgrens. He pulled his frigates and sloops inside the bar to join his ironclads.
The squadron had barely sorted out its formation when masts from at least a dozen ships dotted the horizon. Smoke plumes soon topped the masts as the engines were engaged. The inefficient engines gulped vast quantities of coal, and warships used sail as much as possible before switching to their engines for propulsion. Now that their objective was almost within sight, the British black gangs swung into work to stoke the fires that would give their ships that mobility and agility that sail could never match.
Finally, the last of the picket ships steamed through the bar to signal the flagship of the enemy’s imminent approach. One by one the masts increased until fifteen and more could be counted. The captain of the picket ship came alongside to report that he had counted four ships of the line, the rest frigates and smaller ships. The captain shouted through his megaphone, “But leading them is the biggest ship I have ever seen in my life, Admiral. She’s black from fore to aft. Must be the Warrior.” There was a stir on Dahlgren’s bridge among his staff, but the admiral’s face did not show a flicker of change. Captain Rowan just smiled. He had fought his ship and had the utmost confidence in her and her crew in battle. He knew the Warrior’s captain, or for that matter, the captain of most Royal Navy ships at this time, could not say the same.
In fact, the picket ship’s captain had been wrong. The great black ship he had seen was not the Warrior but her sister ship, the Black Prince, commanded by Capt. James Francis Ballard Wainwright. An able officer, Wainwright had commanded his ship for more than eighteen months and, as a mark of his ability, had served as second in command of the Channel Squadron. The squadron sailing toward Charleston was only the smaller part of Milne’s concentration at Bermuda. He shrewdly concluded that with the massing of the Royal Navys there was a clear indication that Charleston was its objective. The element of strategic surprise had never been realistic. He would have wagered to a certainty that the enemy knew the British were coming to Charleston. They already knew in Washington that the Royal Navy had seized Portland Harbor, though the town itself was still under siege. They were even more painfully aware that ships from Halifax were raiding the sea-lanes to New York and Boston. Their eyes were drawn north and south. It was toward the middle coast of the Atlantic seaboard that Milne was sailing with the bulk of his force-for Chesapeake Bay and the approaches to Washington and Baltimore. Admiral Cochrane had showed the way in 1814, inflicting great damage and even greater humiliation on the Americans by ravaging the shores of the great bay. Since they had seemed to have forgotten that lesson, he was determined to repeat it in such a forceful manner that it would linger and produce a national flinch whenever the thought of crossing the Royal Navy even occurred to them. Milne knew that the Union could never be physically destroyed, but it would give up the game if enough pain were inflicted. The second loss of their capital in less than fifty years would be a mighty weight dropped against the scales of their morale and will to fight.
He had wanted to trap the Americans inside the bar at Charleston and starve them out or destroy them when they came out to fight, but his plans had been countermanded by the Admiralty under intense pressure from the cabinet as well as the merchants of the great textile-manufacturing cities for immediate access to the millions of pounds of prime Southern cotton warehoused in Charleston. Factories were closing rapidly now in the second year of cotton starvation of Britain’s mills. The government had also concluded that full employment was a prudent counter to any lingering sympathy for the Union among the mill workers. Beyond this was the cabinet’s strategic calculation of the need to eliminate the Union’s stranglehold on the South. He was ordered to immediately break the blockade by destroying the American South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. The strong squadron led by the Black Prince was more than enough to sweep away Dahlgren’s little ships, overwhelm his frigate and sloops, and pound the monitors, admittedly at close range, into junk with their vastly superior weight of metal.
Milne had no choice. He would rely on his accurate long-range Armstrongs to do as much damage as they could before his ships closed with the Americans. The main effort would then be borne by the mainstay of the fleet, its 68-pounder gun. Milne had emphasized again and again to his captains who would go up against the American ironclads to close to within two hundred feet. The Admiralty reports indicated that only at that range would the 68-pounder be able to punch through American armor. It would be a matter of hard pounding at close range, something from which the Royal Navy had never shrunk.
HMS BLACK PRINCE, OFF THE CHARLESTON BAR, SOUTH CAROLINA, 9:30 AM, OCTOBER 8, 1863
Rear Adm. Sir Michael Seymour, commanding the strike against Charleston, may have shared Milne’s assurance that his force could make short work of the Americans inside the bar, but getting to grips with them was no easy matter. The normal prudence of a sailor and his experience in the blockade and bombardment of the main Russian naval base in the Baltic at Kronstadt during the Crimean War had confirmed to him the dangers of attacking through confined waters and into major estuaries. At the age of sixty-one and the son of an admiral, Seymour was about as experienced and competent a senior officer as the Royal Navy could produce. In the Kronstadt expedition, he had been second in command. After the war he had commanded the Royal Navy’s East Indies Station and destroyed the Chinese fleet in June of 1857 during the Second Opium War and had taken Canton. The next year he had taken the forts on the Pei Ho River, forcing the Treaties of Tianjin on China. He was made Knight of the Bath the next year and sat as a member of Parliament for Devonport since 1859. When the Admiralty had sent Seymour out with the Channel Squadron reinforcement, Milne found him the natural and politic choice to command the Charleston expedition. Dahlgren would be facing a fighting man.
The Southern pilots Seymour had engaged at Bermuda had assured him that Black Prince, on which he kept his flag, and his other deep-draft ships of the line and frigates would be able at high tide to cross the bar off Charleston. The bar was a great ridge of mud pushed out to sea by the combined flow of the Ashley and Cooper rivers that swept around Charleston and emptied into the harbor, flowing around Fort Sumter before they met the sea. It was like a great undersea parapet behind which the Americans safely sheltered except when the tide ran in twice a day.
In the morning Seymour could see Dahlgren’s ships across the bar. The large bulk of New Ironsides stood out in the middle of the American line. She was their toughest and largest ship, he had been informed, but less than half the size of Black Prince. Fore and aft of her floated four of the low-profile monitors, their black turrets more like bumps floating on the calm sea. In a parallel line behind them were the wooden warships, the frigates Wabash and Powhatan, and the three sloops, Pawnee, Housatonic, and Canandaigua. He was surprised to see so few ships-ten in all. There were supposed to be seven monitors, but the sharpest eye aloft could only count four: Lehigh, Montauk, Nahant, and Catskill. Seymour did not know that the remaining three monitors (Patapsco, Weehawken, and Passaic) had been sent to Port Royal for repairs.