A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril an Alternate History (25 page)

Baker went on, "It's actually the easiest duty in Washington. Just
sit outside his office or follow him around and keep the office seekers
off him. And there's some free entertainment. He likes to go to the theater a lot."

KENNEBUNK, MAINE, 10:18 AM, OCTOBER 25, 1863

As soon as Hope Grant caught up with the British Portland Force marching south to meet the American VI Corps, the column picked up its pace.
As commander of all of Her Majesty's forces in British North America,
he immediately assumed command. As an old cavalryman, he knew the
value of speed. In this he was much like the late Stonewall Jackson. He
pushed his Imperial and Canadian battalions down the Portland Road.
Scouts reported the advance of the Americans coming north also on the
Portland Road. John Sedgwick knew how to hard-march his men as well
as Grant. The forced march of the VI Corps to Gettysburg on July 2 had
been an achievement by any standard. They numbered fifteen thousand
men and forty-two guns. They were tough as nails.'

Grant's study of the map pointed to the little town of Kennehunk,
bisected by its eponymous river, as the likely point where the two columns would meet. The river was crossed by Durrell's Bridge, which connected the two halves of the town, and seven shipyards clustered down
both banks. Kennehunk was a major shipbuilding center, and building
materials lined the streets and roads leading to the river. Doyle could
tell him little of the enemy that he faced other than its high reputation
as a fighting formation and its commander as a fighting general. Almost
immediately, Grant sent a courier off to the coast to make contact with
whatever Royal Navy ships were blockading Kennehunk at Kennehunk-
port, a few miles downriver.

For Sedgwick's part, he had no idea that he was about to meet the
foremost British general of the age. His last information had Doyle still
at Portland. Grant had had the foresight to cut the telegraph and race
ahead of any warning. The Brunswick Regiment of Yeomanry Cavalry
was effectively screening his advance -until they were hit hard by the
small cavalry brigade attached to Segdwick's corps. At the first sound of
gunfire to his front, Grant deployed his battalions and moved forward.
It was not long before the Canadian cavalry came flying past. The Union
cavalry were close behind, but the closely wooded road had masked the red lines from them until the last moment. A volley from the 17th Foot
brought down the head of the column in a tangle of bodies and screaming, flailing horses. Grant ordered them forward, and the red ranks
surged ahead, bayonets at the level.

Sedgwick's first knowledge of the British was when some of his cavalry came tearing back through Kennehunk to tell him that they had run
into redcoats only a few miles north. No one ever accused Uncle John
of being a Napoleon, but he was steady and unflappable, attributed by
some to an utter lack of imagination. But he knew what to do in a fight.
His first division was approaching the bridge over the Kennehunk River.
The others were strung out for miles to the south. He sent couriers after
them to hurry the pace.

The first men over the bridge would be Horatio G. Wright's 1st
Division. Sedgwick wanted his best to land the first punch. Wright had
only recently been given division command after a brilliant record in
the West. The man was slated for a corps command one day, and Meade
had been eager to find him a division. Meade had other reasons. Wright
would be senior to the 2nd Division commander, Brig. Gen. Albion P.
Howe, who had the great talent of alienating just about everyone above
him in the chain of command. Howe and Sedgwick simply did not get
along. Howe was also a partisan of Hooker's, whom Meade has succeeded, and then a partisan of Sickles in the controversies surrounding
Gettysburg, going so far as to testify against Meade before the House's
witch-hunting Committee on the Conduct of the War. It was inevitable
that Howe would come to be called "Perfidious Albion."

PORT HUDSON, LOUISIANA, 12:33 PM, OCTOBER 25, 1863

It had been the retreat through a green hell. The exhausted survivors of
Franklin's XIX Corps struggled into the defenses of Port Hudson as the
black faces of the Corps d'Afrique looked on their shambling ranks with
wide eyes. It had only been a fifty-mile march, but miles down roads that
were barely tracks through the great stinking expanse of swamp, marsh,
and bayou. One by one its wagons and guns had been abandoned and at
last even its ambulances full of groaning misery. The wounded had been
mounted on the horses or carried in litters.

On the road north from Vermillionville to Opelousas, Franklin had
gone northeast to Leonville to cross Bayou Teche, then back south to Araudville and from there the great "muck march," as the men would
call it, to the Bayou Grosse Pointe and across. It was there that Franklin
heard the news of the fall of New Orleans and the imminent fall of Baton
Rouge. That dashed his hopes of taking the railroad from Rosedale to
West Baton Rouge. He would have to take his worn-out men another
fifteen miles north through more hellish swamp country to safety in
the fortifications of Port Hudson. Along with Vicksburg, Port Hudson
had been one of the two strong fortresses keeping the Mississippi out of
Union hands. It had fallen four days after Vicksburg. Now he realized it
would have to serve the Union, hopefully better than it had served the
Confederacy.

Franklin was thankful to find the river below Port Hudson filled
by the U.S. Navy. A good part of the river squadrons that had fought
so hard to free the Mississippi were there. The sailors was glad of the
chance to do something useful in the midst of catastrophe and ferry
Franklin's men over to Port Hudson. It was a nervous post commander,
Brig. Gen. George A. Andrews, who met Franklin at the landing. All
he could talk about was how the French army and fleet were about to
march upriver and overrun the fort. Franklin smelled the man's panic
and pulled him by the arm over to a quiet place. "General, this fort will
hold, by God. This fort will hold. And you are going to help me do it."
All Andrews seemed to need was someone to take charge, and Franklin had done just that. "First thing, I need to get my men fed and the
wounded to hospital." Andrews's panic had not let him neglect the military administration he was very good at.

"I've already given orders, sir. Every cook at this post is slaving
away, and more tents are going up at the hospital. We've already been
overrun by refugees up from New Orleans, so we were doing a lot of this
anyway. The Navy's brought thousands to here and Baton Rouge."

"What is the strength of the garrison?"

"Besides four artillery batteries and a cavalry regiment, I have a brigade of infantry of the Corps d'Afrique-about three and half thousand
men in all."

"I have one of my own brigades at Baton Rouge, "said Franklin,
"but the place can't be held against a superior force. The last I saw of
Banks, he was with XIII Corps as it was being crushed by the French. Do
you have any word from him?

"Nothing, General."

"Then who is in command of the Department of the Gulf?"

"Why, I expect you are, sir."

KENNEBUNK, MAINE, 1:29 PM, OCTOBER 25, 1863

Big white flakes were falling in the first snow of the season as the
command group galloped along Main Street north of the bridge. The
sound of gunfire up ahead seemed muffled by the falling white blanket
when a shell burst overhead in an orange spasm that spewed black iron
fragments. Sedgwick rose up from the saddle and then toppled over to
the ground without a sound. His staff rushed to him, but the gaping hole
in his forehead told them there was nothing to be done. He had been riding beside a regiment pushing forward to the fight and was waving them
on with his hat. They had seen him go down and groaned as one man. VI
Corps loved "Uncle John" and would not take this kindly.'

The 1st Division had barely passed over the bridge when the British hit the head of the column on the edge of town. Hope Grant's map
reconnaissance told him the bridge was key terrain feature, a choke point
that delayed passage of large bodies of men and vehicles. If he could
catch part of the enemy's force on the near side and smash it, then the
remainder would retreat. He did not need to destroy the enemy, just
keep them from relieving Portland. Without Portland, Canada could not
be held.

His timing had been flawless. He had driven back the enemy cavalry and then marched so quickly that he was able to catch the Americans before they were even halfway across the bridge and still in column.
That had been the easy part. Speed, surprise, and the grit to slug it out
toe to toe had been the secret of his success against Sepoy and Chinaman. Against the Americans it might not he enough.

Speed had brought Grant's red battalions sweeping up to Kennehunk. The British hreechloading Armstrong guns were very accurate
at a long distance, and their first volley killed Sedgwick and burst over
the stone spans of Durrell's Bridge, which was packed with men of the
49th Pennsylvania and the guns of the Battery F, 5th U.S. Artillery. The
bridge exploded into a bloody shamble, clogged with dead and wounded men and horses, and guns, caissons, and limbers overturned by their
dying and wounded animals.

Wright now found himself on the north side of the river with only
two brigades. His last brigade and the other two divisions were stacked
up on High Street on the other side of the river as men desperately tired
to clear the bridge. Wright was ignorant of both Sedgwick's death and
the severing of the corps column because he was urging on Brig. Gen.
Alfred T. A. Torbert's New Jersey Brigade in the lead. He knew the enemy was ahead from the reports of the cavalry and was determined to get
his division out of town and deployed. Grant had the opposite purpose.
The last thing he wanted was for the Americans to deploy outside the
town; then they would be able to feed their entire force into the fight and
have numbers on their side. No, he must hit them in the town and force
them back to the bridge. It was a race, pure and simple.

That was why Wright rode past the 1st New Jersey, his lead regiment, to personally reconnoiter the ground ahead for the battle. Behind
him rode his escort, a hundred men of the 1st Vermont Cavalry. Almost
as soon as they turned off Main Street to the Portland Road, they ran
into the Canadian 54th Sherbrooke Battalion blocking the road. Their
volley ripped into the head of the cavalry column, tumbling men and
horses in a kicking, screaming knot on the road. As the survivors turned
back, skirmishers went forward to round up prisoners. Pinned under his
horse, Wright found himself looking up into the blued point of a Canadian bayonet. Beyond the honor of capturing a general officer, the Sherbrooke men had done a great service to Grant. They had decapitated VI
Corps. With Sedgwick dead and Wright captured, command would have
devolved on Albion Howe, had he known of the fate of the other two.
But he was still south of the bridge with his division. VI Corps would
fight that day without a commander.'

Sweeping in from the south, the 17th (Leicestershire) Foot, almost a
thousand men strong, struck Wright's lead regiment, the 1st New Jersey,
just as it exited the town. The British were known as the Bengal Tigers
from their service in India, and an apt nickname it was. Their volley
shattered the far smaller New Jersey regiment, and their bayonet charge
finished them off. They pushed down Main Street to collide with the
next regiment, the 4th New Jersey, which stubbornly blocked the road.
Two more Canadian militia battalions came up to feel the flanks.

Grant himself led the 63rd (West Suffolk) Regiment of Foot known
as the Blood Suckers, with its three Canadian militia battalions of the
Niagara Brigade to attack into the town from the west. They drove
straight to the bridge to run into Wright's third brigade, which had
just cleared the wreckage and was beginning to stream across. The
5th Wisconsin double-timed off the bridge to wheel into line to face the
Niagaras.

Wisconsin regiments were particularly tough. Wisconsin was the
only state to keep its original regiments up to strength rather than raise
new regiments as the old ones shrank due to casualties and illness.
Regiments were kept strong, and the fighting skills and spirit of the old
hands was passed to the new men. Now, seven hundred Wisconsin men,
flanked by battery of the Rhode Island Light Artillery, leveled their rifles and fired into the red-coated column coming down Stover Street. The six
guns followed in ten seconds to catch the men in the back of the column.
The 58th Compton Battalion disintegrated from the blows. The Wisconsin men pushed up the street in pursuit where they ran into the Blood
Suckers coming their way. Both columns fired at the same time. The 5th
Wisconsin's colonel and lieutenant colonel both went down, as did the
commander of the 63rd. Now it was a soldier's fight as the men spread
out among the houses and yards. A company was too big to control as
the fighting went house to house. It was close-quarters work with pistol,
rifle butt, and bayonet as groups of men broke into a house or fired from
its windows, and rushed across small yards. The 119th Pennsylvania
fed into the fight just as more Canadian militia were flanking through
the alleys.10