A few smaller ships hung in the distance to the south, hugging the shore off Morris Island. Seymour took these to be the support vessels of the American squadron trying to stay as far away from the action as possible. The small submersible tender with its two boats was not in evidence, hidden behind the American flagship as Atlanta hid behind the bulk of the Wabash.
Seymour had to suppress a sense of elation that he had caught Dahlgren before he could concentrate his command. His Southern informants had provided detailed information on the strength and location of the almost eighty ships of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. Dahlgren’s command numbered more than eight thousand men scattered in ships up and down the Georgia and South Carolina coasts and at Port Royal and a few other enclaves in offshore islands. Not more than twenty ships were actually at Charleston. Almost thirty were at Port Royal, under repair or coaling. The rest were spread up and down the coast. What Seymour did not know was that Dahlgren had indeed been able to concentrate his sloops and frigates as well as the gunboats. The latter Seymour had mistaken for the support vehicles clinging to the shallow water of Stono Inlet off Morris Island. Their shallow drafts had allowed most to slip up the inlets and out of sight.
Seymour’s nineteen ships carried eight thousand men, or 13 percent of the strength of the Royal Navy, and mounted six hundred guns, the largest concentration of naval power the Royal Navy had committed to battle since Trafalgar. Seymour would have been even more encouraged had he known he outnumbered Dahlgren almost four to one in men. The American’s crews numbered not even 2,200 men manning 114 guns, but 90 of these guns were Dahlgrens.
The odds were with him, Seymour concluded. He paused to recite a passage from Thucydides. In the long days at sea as a midshipman, he had taken to heart the words of the Spartan king Archidamus II in the Peloponnesian War: In practice we always base our preparations against an enemy on the assumption that his plans are good. Indeed, it is right to rest our hope not on the belief in his blunders, but the soundness of our provisions. Nor ought we believe that there is much difference between man and man, but to think that superiority lies with him who is reared in the severest school.
His thoughts drifted back to those golden days of his youth when ships were all powered by cooperation of God’s wind and man’s sail and did not trail a smudge of dirty coal smoke. He also summoned another comment memorized in his younger days, an American quote at that. It was from their Adm. Stephen Decatur on his observation of one of the first steam engines to power a ship: “Yes, it is the end of our business; hereafter any man who can boil a tea-kettle will be as good as the best of us.”
Seymour brought himself back to the present. He walked over the deck, put his hands on the sun-warmed railing, took a deep breath, and looked around at the wide expanse of sea and sky and the wide mouth of the Charleston Harbor entrance. He could take unalloyed pleasure that the weather would not be another adversary this day. Only the lightest breeze stirred the air in a cloudless sky, a perfect early October day. There was just enough wind to carry off the smoke.
If he had any qualms about the coming battle it was over the safety of HRH Albert, the nineteen-year-old son of the Queen (and second in line to the throne), a newly promoted lieutenant aboard the corvette HMS Racoon, on which he had been serving since January. It was a general consensus in the captains’ cabins and crews’ quarters of the fleet that Albert was a zealous and competent officer, but he was also had an angry and rude personality. He earned no love beneath decks, where they called him “the King of the Greeks.” Just that year the Greeks, having disposed of their overbearing Bavarian royal line, had voted to make young Albert “King of the Hellenes.” Victoria had not been amused. It was enough though that Britain’s treaty obligations prevented a member of her royal family from ascending the Greek throne. The offer was politely declined.
Dahlgren was also thanking the weather for its neutrality. A heavy sea would have been a greater danger to his monitors than the enemy would be. They were hard enough to handle in calm water without rough weather swamping their decks. It was lost on no one that the original Monitor had sunk in a storm. His monitors needed flat seas to steady their ungainly shape and allow the twin heavy Dahlgrens in their turrets clear aim. The admiral, like his British opposite, also had a young man to worry about-Ulric was all energy, pacing awkwardly with his new cork leg up and down the deck. Dahngren suggested a place of safety in the upcoming fight. “Ullie, I want you to be with me in the pilothouse.”
Something flashed across Ulric’s eyes, but he softened it into a smile. “It will be more exciting with the Marines, Papa. I will just get in the way in that tiny pilothouse, and I am familiar with the gun drill of the Marine gun crews. You of all people should know how well I can get around a Navy gun. How many times did I practice with them at the Navy Yard?”
Dahlgren forced himself to tuck that worry away; the service was his life, and he owed it his complete attention. He had been in bad health for longer than a month now; it had deepened the lines of his already gaunt face. Now he summoned from the depths of will and duty every fiber of his ability for the supreme moment that was coming. Seymour was aware of Dahlgren’s pioneering work in ordnance, but it was a general sort of awareness that did not seriously contemplate how much that expertise might weigh in the coming fight.
THE BATTERY, CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, 3:05 PM, OCTOBER 8, 1863
It had not taken long for the word to spread through Charleston and its defenses that the British had arrived off the bar. The city emptied as people rushed down to the river and crowded the docks from the slave market all the way down to the Battery at the tip of the peninsula that held the city. The well connected found places in the balconies of the mansions that lined the Battery. From one of them, Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant de Beauregard had given the order to fire on Fort Sumter almost two and half years ago. That was the event that had triggered this grinding war. The little Louisiana Creole dandy ostentatiously chose the same balcony to watch the distant battle, though little more than smoke would be visible at the five- to six-mile distance. Now many were quick to hope that they might witness the end of that war from the same vantage. With him was Capt. Duncan Ingraham, the commander of the Charleston Naval Station. To his immense chagrin, he had nowhere else to be. The two Confederate ironclads under his command, Palmetto State and Chicora, were idled by engine repairs. Had that not been the case, nothing on this earth would have kept him from joining the upcoming battle.
The war had just about ruined Charleston. Hardly a blockade-runner got through Dahlgren’s ships anymore. The warehouses along the docks were crammed to the rafters with bales of cotton. The white brick warehouse at the end of East Ager Dock just south of the battery alone held thousands of bales of unrealized wealth as the paint peeled from its walls. Once the leading port for the export of the South’s “white gold,” Charleston’s economic life was near death; it was now plain shabby and its dwindling population increasingly threadbare and pinched.