A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril an Alternate History (24 page)

For that reason, Davis was stunned by Layard's official message.
It was clear to him that Layard had the impossible task of attempting to
square a circle. "I regret that Her Majesty's government is unable at this
time to offer your government formal recognition or alliance."

Davis's response was unprintable.

Layard attempted to explain, but even his aplomb was unsettled by
the seething anger of the sharp-faced man in front of him. "Honor left
Great Britain no other recourse after the attack on one of Her Majesty's
warships in British waters than to go to war to avenge this outrage." If
his role in this chain of events bothered him, it was not apparent. "The
nation will support a war against the United States for this reason, sir. At
this time, it will not support a war to maintain slavery."

Davis shot back, "Such distinctions are a fantasy, Mr. Layard. This
war has already become indivisible by such artful distinctions. And I
assure you, sir, from my own considerable experience, war is a great destroyer of assumptions. The iron law of necessity demands recognition
and alliance. You would hamstring yourself without them."

Layard resumed. "As I said, Mr. Davis, at this time, we are not prepared to offer recognition and alliance. But Her Majesty's government
recognizes that the force of events will alter perceptions of necessity
at some point in the future. Only then will recognition and alliance be
possible."

"Alliance already exists de facto, Mr. Layard. You fought a battle to
break the blockade. Your ships ride in Charleston Harbor and have the
full use of the Navy Yard. Your wounded are cared for in our hospitals.
Royal arsenals and factories supply our armies. Your armies already occupy territory of our mutual enemy, and you have blockaded his coast.
What would you call this state of affairs?"

"That is the purpose of my visit-to fashion a de facto cooperation
that will serve the practical necessities of alliance. The difference between de facto and de jure, sir, is often a gossamer."

For the first time, the flicker of a smile played on Davis's face. "Tell
that to a bastard, Mr. Layard."

"Ah, Mr. Davis, there is always the possibility that rightful legitimacy will be discovered in due time."

UNION RAILROAD STATION, INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA,
2:44 PM, OCTOBER 24, 1863

Sherman's aides could not take their eyes off the crowds of men at the
station as the general's train slowly came to a stop. There must have
been at least two thousand, most in faded blue with a bedroll or knapsack, but most without weapons. They were not in any military formation, but they showed the innate sense of order of veterans. "It's been
like this at every station since we left Chicago," one officer said.

It was the crowds of men in faded blue that raised the morale of
Sherman's troops as they sped south. These were discharged veterans,
men who had enlisted for two years in 1861 and had been discharged.
They had gone home satisfied that they had done their share and vowing never to rejoin the Army. With them were thousands more who had
been invalided home for wounds or sickness. There was more than one
limp or cough among them still. Now they were back, trudging down
the roads, gathering at the railroad stations demanding to be sent back
to their regiments, and taking the oath of enlistment from any military or
naval officer they could find. Entire discharged regiments assembled in
their original camps of instruction and marched in step to the railroads,
their tattered colors drawn from the state houses or from the place of
honor in the home of some beloved commander. Even deserters came
back in response to Sherman's blanket amnesty. Trains were commandeered to move this growing host. Sherman would arrive to reinforce
Grant, not with a single corps but with an army.

As the train slowed to a halt at the bunting-draped main station
building, Sherman could see what was obviously a delegation of civilians, chief among them the tall and rotund figure of Governor Morton.
A band was playing "Rally Round the Flag, Boys!" to sea of men in blue.
In the midst of crowd was what first appeared to be several batteries of
artillery. A closer look showed the barrels to be circlets of heavy rifle barrels mounted on what looked like light artillery gun carriages.

As soon as Sherman emerged from the car, the throng erupted into
hearty soldier cheers. Morton stepped forward, the platform boards
creaking under his weight. He thrust out his hand to Sherman and the
crowd cheered even more. Morton may not have been a soldier, but he
knew public relations. "Wave, General, wave. Use the moment." It was
hard for Sherman, who loathed anything smacking of a politician's oily pretence, but he waved. Now the crowd was chanting, "Billy! Billy!
Billy!" It washed over him with the force of nature.

Morton linked arms with Sherman as he waved his hat at the
crowd. He whispered into Sherman's ear, "Indiana has another gift for
the Army, General. I want you to meet Richard Gatling."

MILL ROW, MANCHESTER, ENGLAND, 3:50 PM. OCTOBER 24, 1863

Edward, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, had had to beg his
mother to give him some role in supporting the war. She had not forgiven him for his father's death. Prince Albert had gone to his son's sickbed
and caught there the typhoid that killed him. It had taken the intercession of the government to plead with the queen that he allowed to do his
part to strengthen national resolve.

The sinking of HMS Liverpool in British waters by two American
warships had filled the British public with an incandescent rage. It had
been worth John Bright's life to speak out, but speak he did. Here and
there, when the first enthusiastic rush of patriotism had worn down,
thoughts of the consequences of the war became hard to ignore. And
the most glaring of these was that Great Britain had essentially gone to
war in support of the slaveholding South and was now in de facto alliance. The loss of Liverpool was the poisoned fruit of British support of
the Confederacy and only the ostensible cause of war. Too many men
had become rich over that support, and too many more had had their
prejudices against American democracy flattered by that support. The
establishment-privilege-had done everything to bring on this war.
And now that it had come, privilege began to worry.

So Mill Row, the mill worker's row cottages for one of the big cotton
manufacturers in Manchester, had been chosen by the government for a
visit by His Royal Highness to encourage support for the war. Despite
the tens of thousands unemployed by the Confederate cotton embargo,
Army enlistments had slowed to a trickle. The crowd that came to see
him had been large but distressingly restrained with its applause after he
read the speech prepared for him, and that clearly was not due to the ingrained good manners of the British. After the speech, he walked down
Mill Row in one of those rare exposures to the common people that only
the necessity of war could provoke. He stopped every few yards to speak
to someone in the respectful crowd. It was painfully obvious that he did not have the common touch, but he was the queen's son, and there was a
deep reverence for Victoria.

He stopped by a young man, not more than twenty-two years old,
who seemed sound enough to be a soldier and had that Everyman look
that is more disguise than window. Edward thought him a suitable stage
for his performance. "Well, my good fellow, will you enlist today and
make Manchester proud?"

The young man doffed his cap and bowed slightly. Then he said
plainly, "No, sir."

"No, sir?" Edward blurted out in surprise. "And why not?" Edward
had stepped into the trap that only the most experienced and quick-witted politician can extricate himself from. And Edward was neither. Don't
ask a question you don't know the answer to or don't want to hear.

The young man's gaze seemed harden. "Have you ever watched
your child starve, sir?" His knuckles clutching his hat were white.

Edward was speechless, but his entourage gasped. No one asked
him anything with such raw emotional bluntness, much less the type
of person who normally cleaned his boots. If such a person addressed a
question to him, it was invariably for instruction in meeting his needs.

"I named her Vicky, sir, after your mother, I did. She was God's
gift, always laughing, golden curls. And when the slaveholders cut off
the cotton and put me out of work, I watched her starve. I could find
no work. I watched the flesh melt from her bones and her hair turn to
straw." He voice caught.

Edward could only murmur, "I'm so sorry, my good man."

"She didn't die, sir, though the reaper was walking to my door,
for sure."

"Well, then... "

"You see, sir, it was American bread that saved her and the pennies
of the Americans who felt more pity for us than the slaveholders did."

Edward's entourage could see a disaster in the making and tried to
move him on, but it was as if the prince had been glued to the cobbles as
the crowd pressed in to hear every word. All he could mutter was something about standing up for your country.

"I love my country, sir, but my country would have let my child
starve, like it did the Irish. Only the Americans showed pity."

The crowd had hung on every word and packed in tight. It began to buzz. Another man spoke up. "It is shame on this country to fight for the
slaveholders. This is not our war."

Then another voice louder, "Privilege will see us all slaves!"

Another voice shouted, "I have family in America. We are shedding our own blood!" It was a rare member of the lower orders that did
not have kin in North America. The buzz became a roar, and the crowd
began to seethe. It was then that the chief constable acted to force a path
for the prince and his entourage and insist they leave immediately.

The next day's lead article in The People's Paper carried the headline, under the byline of Karl Marx, "Mill Workers Demand End to the
American War." He knew that the paper would be on the next packet
for Canada and then smuggled to the United States where it would be
reprinted in the New York Tribune, the formidable anti-slavery and proLincoln engine of opinion. It was almost as if Karl Marx had a direct line
to Abraham Lincoln himself.

That evening, the papers from London arrived in Dublin where
Marx's report was read with perhaps even more interest than it would
be in New York. Ireland had bled away over half her population of over
eight million in the last fifteen years, and the green land was still stricken by the nightmare of the Great Famine that left almost two million
corpses strewn about its empty cottages, country roads, and poorhouses.
Another two million had fled ahead of grim starvation, many to Canada
and Australia but most to the United States. Memories among the survivors of the starving time were bone deep with a permanent fester of hatred for the government that had ignored their plight, more anxious not
to interfere with the working of a free market. It was remarked that the
British showed more care for their dusky colonial subjects than their fellow Christians right across the Irish Sea. Safe and snug in Britain, privilege had not seen the convoys of grain being exported from the starving
country, trailing thousands of emaciated beggars fended off by the bayonets of the redcoat escorts.

The wrath of outraged England at the loss of HMS Liverpool had
not flared so brightly in Ireland outside the Protestant Anglo-Irish
world. But the country by and large was still loyal, if only out of habit,
and would shoulder the burden of this new cousin's war. But not all.
Underneath the veneer of loyalty, the seeds of fifty years and more of
the growth of Irish nationalism were sprouting. "Ireland's centuries-old dream of independence materialized in the collective form of a body of
Irish rebels on 'the old sod and the new sod-America-alike."' They
came to be called Fenians by the British, a blanket term for any of the
Irish who advocated independence. But the British were inexplicably
blind to the spread of the movement.

They were especially blind where their own power concentrated.
The British garrison of Ireland was shot through with Fenians. Just before the war, a quarter of the garrison's twenty-six thousand men had
taken the Fenian oath "to free the Irish people from seven hundred years
of oppressive British colonial rule or to die in the struggle."6 So many
Irish in the garrison of their own country was not unusual, for Ireland
had been the prime recruiting ground for the Crown. Only a few decades
earlier, before the Great Famine winnowed the Irish so cruelly, Ireland
supplied fully half the enlisted strength of the British Army. Only the
loss of half of its population since then had allowed that figure to drop
below fifty percent for the first time. Now, ten thousand men of that garrison were on at sea on their way to Canada, some of them serenaded by
the music of hymns, Mozart, and Bach.

OFFICE OF THE SECRET SERVICE, WASHINGTON, D.C.,
4:47 PM, OCTOBER 24, 1863

"Well, Miller, you're in luck. The president's bodyguard has gone missing, and I'm short a man to fill that post." Lafayette Baker normally had
quite a pack of agents at hand, but he had run the cupboard bare with
the explosion of enemies, except for this new Midwesterner. And the
man had done well in the assignment he had been given. That sniveling,
noisy actor had shut up most ostentatiously.

Yes, luck was not what Big Jim Smoke had counted on when he had
knifed the bodyguard and dumped his body into the Potomac River after
the two stumbled out of an Alexandria dockside tavern two nights ago.
He counted on the odds. If they ever found the body, it would be unrecognizable. The Copperhead organization in Washington had not been
decapitated as it had been everywhere else. It was used to lying low in
the den of the enemy, but its links farther south into Rebeldom had not
been neglected. Shadowy orders had flowed north: weaken or penetrate
the security around Seward, Stanton, and Lincoln.