A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril an Alternate History (11 page)

American colors were much simpler. U.S. Army regiments carried
the national colors, the Stars and Stripes, and a regimental flag, usually
dark blue with a large embroidered American eagle in the center and the
regimental number on a red wreath beneath. Exceptions were made for
certain volunteer regiments. For example, the Irish Brigade's regiments
carried the green flag of Ireland, which displayed a golden harp on an
emerald green field. Battles honors were often written on the red and
white stripes of the national colors. However, Confederate regiments carried only a single flag - the Stars and Bars on a square field-referred to
by their opponents as "those damned red flags of rebellion.""

Colors were as highly prized as any Roman standard, and it was the
ultimate disgrace to lose either flag in battle, which made it an extremely
rare occurrence. In the past, colors had been lost when regiments had to
capitulate as part of larger forces that had been trapped, such as at the
battles of Saratoga and Yorktown in the American War of Independence.
In combat, however, if any enemy picked up a British flag, it was usually
because they found it surrounded by the dead of the regiment. By the
time of the Civil War, rifled weapons had made the role of color bearer
exceedingly dangerous, if not a death sentence. American regiments,
North and South, usually collected a special fund for their families.

The two Scots battalions, the Scots Fusilier Guards and the 25th
Foot, King's Own Scottish Borderers, did not wear kilts, which was a
Highland regiment prerogative. Only the bagpipers of the former were
kilted in the Royal Stuart tartan. The regimental march was "Blue Bonnets over the Border." For all their bagpipes, this battalion was more
English than Scottish, having only its recruiting parties visiting Scotland,
while being stationed permanently in London. In March 1861, 59 percent
(557) of its 996 officers and men were English; only 272 were Scots (27
percent). The rest (14 percent) were Irish.16

Amid all this worship of the traditions of the regiment, the British
Army had undergone important reforms after the Crimean War. The
uniform had been changed after almost a century from the awkward
swallowtail coat to the more comfortable tunic, which had the advantage
keeping a man warmer in winter. Black trousers and a short black shako
topped with a black pompom completed the new uniform. Improvements were also made in the soldier's pack to replace the traditional torture instrument the British soldier had carried for generations. The
two Guards battalions stood out not just for their height but that they
wore, instead of the shako, a bearskin hat eighteen inches tall and weighing only one and half pounds. Their appearance on any field would be
instantly noted.

The soldier was also armed with the superb .577 caliber muzzleloading Enfield rifle of the 1853 pattern, the product of the Royal Small
Arms Factory Enfield. As a weapon, it was only rivaled by the American
Springfield rifle.

The Royal Artillery had also taken the lead in introducing a breakthrough new artillery piece. The field artillery batteries had come
equipped with the new hreechloading Armstrong guns. Breechloading
artillery was a military innovation that had not been adopted by either
the North or the South in America, except for the handful of English
Whitworth rifled guns slipped through the blockade for the Army of
Northern Virginia. Quick-firing and accurate, the Armstrongs had been
introduced with much promise. To Wolseley's dismay, he was discovering that they were problem-plagued. Trials had not revealed any
deficiencies because the manufacturer had carefully trained the crews,
but once in the hands of the Army, the problems became glaringly apparent. Sixty percent of the enlisted men were illiterate, and the simplest
mechanical device confounded most. Their noncommissioned officers
(NCOs) were as steeped as the officer corps in tradition and took an active dislike for such an innovation. Careful training and maintenance
would have eliminated most of these problems, but the NCOs were
hostile and unprepared for that sort of attention to either their men or to
complicated mechanisms. They complained of having to rewrite the venerable gun drill "because the gun loaded at the wrong end." They complained that "the guns were so complicated that the ignorant gunners
would never, ever learn to handle them." And, of course, officers did not
train anyone?'

No matter how good the British infantryman was, however, there
was simply not enough of "that article," as Wellington used to call him.
An effective Canadian auxiliary force was vital to the defense of British
North America. In early 1860, the process of consolidating the many independent companies into battalions began. The first to be so organized
had been granted the title of the 1st Battalion, Prince of Wales Regiment, by Prince Edward when he had toured Canada in 1860. In early 1863, the
2nd Battalion of the Volunteer Militia was designated the 2nd Battalion,
The Queen's Own Rifles of Toronto. The men were issued Enfield rifles
and kit and paid for each day of drill but had to furnish their own uniforms, modeled on the new British Army uniform introduced after the
Crimean War. Rifle battalions, such as the 3rd Battalion, Victoria Volunteer Rifles of Montreal, copied their Imperial counterparts by dressing in
rifle green.

The affiliations with the British regimental system were instinctive
in the English-speaking population and much sought after. In 1862 the
six Scottish clan chiefs in Montreal raised companies that were consolidated into the 5th Volunteer Militia Battalion; its two flank companies
were dressed in tartan trews. In the Maritimes, the militia had a regimental tradition. New Brunswick Regiment of Yeomanry Cavalry had
been formed in 1842 as the first voluntary cavalry regiment in British
North America. Prince Edward Island formed its militia companies into
the Queen's Country Regiment. In Newfoundland the various militia
companies were consolidated into the Royal Canadian Rifle Regiment
in 1862.11

The cavalry troops never did consolidate into battalions; with their
vast forests, Canada and the northernmost states of the Union were not
the best cavalry country. The Canadian cavalry tended to be modeled
more on the American experience of dragoons - ride to the fight but fight
dismounted. They were usually uniformed in blue with yellow facings,
wearing a brown fur busby with a white plume, and armed with saber
and carbine, the latter greatly inferior to the American single-shot Sharps
breechloader.

A unique troop was the Royal Guides of the Governor General's
Bodyguard for Lower Canada, or Royal Guides for short. Based in Montreal, they were actually the "family" troop of Lt. Col. George Denison,
whose grandfather had founded the unit in 1812. His father had commanded it as well. The fifty-five-man unit was unique in both dress
and function. The family's long association with the unit had given
Denison enough familiarity to encourage him to study carefully the
history of cavalry as well as draw on the experiences of the war to the
south. Ardently pro-Confederate, he paid special attention to Southern
achievements. In Denison s creative hands, the Royal Guides became an excellent intelligence-gathering and scouting unit. They wore blue with
white facings and a nickel-plated dragoon helmet with a red feather. In
this case, the soldier as peacock took precedence over a scout's need for
anonymity. It had not taken Wolseley long to appreciate the usefulness
of the Royal Guides and the value of its commander. He and Denison became good friends, and he introduced the Canadian into his small circle
of British Army intimates, men chosen for their abilities. He was one of
the few men Wolseley allowed to call him "Joe."

Denison was part of a relatively small group of openly pro-Confederate Canadians. He was a through and through Imperialist and a
very pugnacious man. Even after Vicksburg and Gettysburg, when such
sympathies did not appear to serve Canadian interests well, he and a
small group of fire-eaters continued to champion the Southern cause.
Both living in Montreal, Wolseley and Denison were inevitably drawn
to each other by similar opinions. "I tell you, Joe," Denison would say,
"that if three and a half million Southerners can come close to beating
the entire North, then what cannot three and a half million British North
Americans backed by Britain achieve?"19 It was a calculation much on
Wolseley's mind.

Three Canadian militia infantry battalions were brigaded with one
British battalion for wartime operations. The British were consciously
following the Roman historical model in which non-Roman auxiliary
cohorts served with the Roman legions. This system was followed in
India, especially after the trauma of the Great Mutiny. In Canada seven
such brigades were created initially. It is no wonder that when overseas,
British units were referred to as "Imperial battalions." The Canadian battalions also trained with these same British battalions and quickly picked
up some of the smartness, field craft, and cunning of the regulars. The
Americans had failed to parcel out their regular units in a similar fashion
at the beginning of the Civil War to leaven the huge masses of volunteers
that had rushed to the colors; their road to professionalism had been
much longer and more painful than their Canadian counterparts.

While the Canadian infantry benefited by training with the Imperial
battalions, they received additional assistance from another 104 British
NCOs specifically sent out as infantry training teams. The small number
of Canadian cavalry was on its own in the absence of British cavalry until the arrival of a training team of fifty-eight British cavalry officers and NCOs. As sound as these measures were, they were only a beginning. Of
the twenty-three Canadian battalions established by September, one had
been raised in 1859, one in 1860, twelve in 1862, and the rest only that
same year of 1863. Although most battalions had been created by incorporating existing militia companies, it took time to meld a battalion-level
organization together, requiring skills -especially in leadership, training, logistics, and maneuver-at a more complex level than existed in
the forty- to fifty-man community-based companies. With only training
together as a battalion the eight days per year allowed by provincial law,
there was a definite limit to how much experience even a close association with an Imperial battalion could impart.20

VERMILLIONVILLE, LOUISIANA, 2:25 PM, OCTOBER 21, 1863

To say that Banks was unsettled by the quickly advancing wave of
French red and blue was an understatement. He had assumed that the
enemy would await his own advance, a conceit common among amateurs. Now that Bazaine had plucked the initiative from his hands, he
just did not know what to do. Unfortunately, his XIII Corps commander,
Maj. Gen. Cadwallader C. Washburn, was as new to that level of command as a soldier could get. He had only assumed that position because
Maj. Gen. E.O.C. Ward, one of Grant's better senior commanders, had
just fallen sick and had to surrender command of the corps that very
day. Grant had referred to Cadwallader as "one of the best administrative officers we have." However, it would not he administration that
would beat the French.21

That left Maj. Gen. William B. Franklin, commander of the smaller
XIX Corps, as the only professional and experienced senior officer on
the field. Franklin, top of his class at West Point in the same years as his
friend Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, was a tough Regular Army fighter
and had seen almost all the major action in the East. One admirer wrote:
"He struck me as an officer of power-large with square face and head,
deep-sunk, determined blue eyes, close-cropped reddish-brown hair and
beard .1122 It was he "who had shared the brunt at Bull Run, who fought
the rear-guard battles from the Chickahominy to the James, and held the
pass of White Oak Swamp against half of Lee's army on the critical day
at Glendale, who won at Crampton's Gap 'the completest victory gained
to that time by any part of the Army of the Potomac .... "'23 His conduct had earned him command of a third of the Army of the Potomac in the
assault at Fredericksburg on Stonewall Jackson's wing of Lee's army.
Franklin fought hard and skillfully, but because Burnside had frittered
away the time necessary to strike hard and fast, the assault never had
a chance. It was no disgrace to be bested by Jackson, and Franklin had
given Old Blue Light some anxious moments that day, a feat few could
boast of.

To that time, Franklin had been as loyal a subordinate as a commander could hope for, but Burnside's gross incompetence was too
much. He plotted to remove Burnside. Instead, he was scapegoated for
the disaster by the witch-hunting Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War. It did not help that he had been a protege of Maj. Gen.
George B. McClellan, an object of special venom to the committee, which
believed his dedication to victory left something to be desired. Ironically,
another plotter, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, succeeded to army command.
Franklin languished in New York without an assignment for six months
until Grant could find a command for him in Banks's military district.

Until he had been given XIX Corps in Banks's Louisiana command,
he had worried that he might be ordered to lead black troops, the ten
regiments of locally recruited blacks known as the Corps d'Afrique. Many
of them were from old Louisiana state militia regiments of free blacks
that had been mobilized by the Confederacy. Once New Orleans had
fallen, they had been largely transferred to federal service, shorn of their
officers. They had seen a deal of active service, and their assault on the
defenses of Port Hudson, though repulsed, had been nothing less than
heroic. Despite his distaste for black troops, Franklin had been appalled
by the nefarious means of recruitment he had found upon his arrival.
Black men had been arrested on the flimsiest charges and given a choice
between enlistment or prison. Franklin's outrage at this practice had put
a stop to it.