A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril an Alternate History (48 page)

Bright's eyes glowed, then dimmed as he realized Disraeli was not
giving the speech of peace. You could hear the drums roll in Disraeli 's
cadences as he called the nation to war for the Empire:

I speak on this subject with confidence to the people of these isles
because I know that they are men who are not ashamed of the
empire which their ancestors created; because I know that they are
not ashamed of the noblest of human sentiments, now decried by
philosophers -the sentiment of patriotism; because I know they
will not he beguiled into believing that that in maintaining their
empire they may forfeit their liberties. One of the greatest of Romans, when asked what were his politics, replied, Imperium et Lib-
ertas. They would not make a had program for a British Ministry.
It is one from which Her Majesty's advisors will not shrink.9

It is said that the working class of this country does not support this war and would he glad to end it under any conditions.
I say that the working classes of England are proud of belonging
to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness-that they
are proud of belonging to an imperial country and are resolved
to maintain the Empire of England. I say with confidence that the
great body of the working class of England utterly repudiate such
sentiments. They have no sympathy with them. They are English to the core. They repudiate such principles. They adhere to national
principles. They are for maintaining the greatness of the Kingdom
and the Empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our sovereign and members of such an empire. No Roman could have been
prouder when he stated, "Civis Romanus sum!"10

Bright's self-control asserted itself. He coldly acknowledged Disraeli's mastery of the floor. He had severed the connection between freedom
in America and the franchise at home and turned the issue into one of
the bedrock patriotism of the working class and imperial glory. Disraeli 's
comparisons between the empire of Rome and that of Britain were brilliant in attaching the rest of British society to war. Such comparisons invariably resonated deeply with a country steeped in classical education.
He could see the effect in the faces of the members hanging on Disraeli 's
every word:

It has been said that the people of this country are deeply interested in the humanitarian considerations involved in the issue of
slavery. All must appreciate such feelings. But I am mistaken if
there he not a yet deeper sentiment on the part of the people of
this country, one with which I cannot doubt the House will ever
sympathize, and that is -the determination to maintain the Empire of England."

That sentiment forbids the surrender of any part of that empire, particularly one in which Her Majesty's subjects are so thickly settled. British North America is as much a jewel in the crown
of empire as is India. We would not abandon the latter during the
Great Mutiny. We will not abandon the former in this Great War.

I will say to the nation that our aim is that embodied in the
very name of our gracious sovereign-victory. We shall summon
the might of this island race as our ancestors have in the past
against the Armada and at Agincourt, Blenheim, Trafalgar, and
Waterloo. We shall not fail history or posterity. Britannia shall he
victorious."

Once again Bright remembered a phrase of Disraeli 's - "We are here
for fame."

THE HOME OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT, NEW YORK CITY,
9:22 PM, NOVEMBER 8, 1863

Ensign Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov made love to the piano as
his fingers danced across the keyboard. He was playing the "Intermezzo
in Modo Classico" by his friend Modest Mussorgsky. The sensuous effect was not lost on the adoring young women in silk and crinoline who
filled Vanderbilt's gilded music room 13

The performance of this good-looking young man with the shortcropped dark hair was a gift of the commander of the Russian squadron
in New York Harbor, Rear Adm. Stefan Lisovsky, to his host, and most
welcome it was. It would be the social event of the week. His audience
also included the movers and shakers of New York society. Even Vanderbilt himself and his guest of honor had taken a break from their closeted meeting with the governor and both state senators to listen to him
summon magic from the grand piano.

Half a world away, another piano's music had been silenced forever
in an act of defenestration. In September, Polish revolutionaries in Warsaw had made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the Russian military
governor of Poland. Russian soldiers then sacked and burned the Zamo-
yski Palace for no other reason than their rage needed an object. As they
rampaged through the grand old structure, they came across the piano of
Frederick Chopin, who had once lived there. In a shower of broken glass,
they had hurled it through a window to crash into the street below.

Now the street outside was the site of a gallows from which a dozen
bodies swung in the cold wind that blew in from across the Russian
steppes. On the gallows platform stood the Russian general commanding
the suppression of the Polish Revolt, Mikhail Nikolayevich Muravyov.
He personally fixed the noose on every Polish prisoner. Then Muravyov "the Hangman" stood back and grinned each time the trapdoor
dropped.14

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C., 10:30 AM, NOVEMBER 9, 1863

A month had passed since the dual victories at Washington and Claverack, with the belated news of Dahlgren's victory at Charleston making it
a triple triumph of American arms. Vermillionville and Kennehunk were
forgotten as a wave of elation surged through the North.

But Lincoln knew that Britannia's fist had only been warded off.
Great Britain was still very much in the ring after this first round and
doing much better than the victory celebrations warranted. That was the
subject of Sharpe's formal report to the cabinet that morning. The report
was something he called "National Strategic Estimate Number One."
Much of what he said was known to his audience, but he tied it together
into a coherent, seamless picture with a crisp objectivity that kept the
studied attention of everyone at the table "s

Washington was half in ruins, many of its wounds concealed by the
same blanket of snow that had shut down active operations along the
Canadian border. The capital's role as the military logistics hub of the
war had been broken. The premier arsenal of the Union was a ruin; the
Navy Yard was hardly in better shape with its dry dock in ashes. The
state of New York had been charred from Schenectady to Cold Spring.
Its Upstate foundries and factories, as well as the arsenal at Watervliet,
were heaps of rubble and ashes. Imports had ceased as the Royal Navy
hovered off the coast.

For all the Navy's victory at Charleston, its blockade of the South
had been shattered. The surviving ships of the North and South Atlantic
Blockading Squadrons had poured into the safety of Norfolk, fighting
their way past the Royal Navy's own blockaders with the monitors in
the lead. It was only owing to the monitors that the Chesapeake Bay was
not a British lake. But the Royal Navy had slammed the door to the sea
shut on the U.S. Navy and the entire Eastern seaboard of the North as
the heavy hand of its blockade settled in. Here the monitors were useless, for they dared not venture out into the heavy seas where the British
watched. The Royal Navy was playing its trump. Where the balled fist
had failed, the long, slow squeeze was far more dangerous. In past wars,
it had strangled its opponents' commerce and confined their fleets to
slow rust and rot in their ports through the inexorable pressure of blockade. And more than the U.S. Navy was shut up in its ports; the nation's
merchant marine, the rival of Great Britain's, now swung idle at home,
fled to neutral ports, or was hunted by the British and French navies off
the oceans.

The South, now freed of its suffocating blockade, found its harbors
from Wilmington to Savannah filled with British, French, and neutral
ships gobbling up the three years of cotton harvest that was bursting from its warehouses. They brought in exchange a river of armaments
and supplies that would banish tattered uniforms, bare feet, and empty
haversacks from the Confederate armies. They also brought the iron
rails and locomotives that would allow the South to begin rebuilding
its worn-out rail system in order to bring its agricultural surplus to its
armies. Britain's industrial base was ten times that of the North and
could meet its own needs as well as the Confederacy's.

In the warm waters of the Gulf, there had been no victories to offset
the bad news. The lightly armed West Gulf Blockading Squadron had
been destroyed by the French off Galveston. The East Gulf squadron
had fled into the safety of the Pensacola naval base. The French Navy
now lurked off the mouth of the Mississippi. A pall had fallen over the
cabinet room as Stanton announced the details of the French victory at
Vermillionville. It was poor comfort that Bazaine's victory, coupled with
that of the French Navy at Galveston, would create as much mortification in London as delight in Paris. What the first Napoleon had so fecklessly sold off, the third Napoleon seemed poised to snatch back. From
Washington, the English and French seemed in firm alliance. It was an
understandable conclusion at that point but one that failed to detect that
the British had refused a formal alliance and were infinitely suspicious of
French intentions. There was even less strategic coordination than with
the Confederacy.

The effects of their reverses at Charleston, Washington, and Claverack, though, had caused London to be less fastidious about the French.
The British cabinet had led the country to war on a wave of outrage over
the Battle of Moelfre Bay, an outrage that had suppressed the natural
sympathies for the Union held by significant parts of the British public and given full rein to the Confederate sympathies of the ruling and
business classes. The unheard of reverses of British arms had stunned
a nation that had come to assume that victory in battle was a national
birthright. There were few voices that questioned the war. Yet they could
be found and even at this early stage sought out-John Bright chief
among them.

These doubts were only the faintest whispers drowned out by a
nation and its empire that set themselves to the task ahead. Parliament
voted vast sums for the war; factory, forge, shipyard, and recruiting station throbbed with energy and will of a great people at war. The British Empire, like the Roman, was an implacable and relentless enemy. The
Royal Navy's ships converged from every far-flung station of empire.
Garrisons were stripped of their troops. Only India, where the embers of
the Great Rebellion still glowed hot in British memory, was not asked for
a single man. The garrisons of Ireland and Great Britain had been denuded for the twenty-thousand-man reinforcement under Maj. Gen. Hope
Grant that by now had arrived in Canada. The militia and volunteers
were being called up to fill their empty garrisons. So heavy was the volunteering that hardly a vacancy could be found in the militia, yeomanry,
and volunteers.

There were even fewer doubts in the American North. It was worth
a man's life now to voice Copperhead sentiments. He would be lucky to
live long enough to be arrested by the authorities. The movement's blatant treason had damned it beyond redemption. Sherman had completed
his march through the Midwest, stamping out the last few holdouts and
was on his way to reinforce Grant at Chattanooga. He left the region
under martial law, a measure Lincoln approved and showed no rush to
lift. Too many dead men had littered the streets from Dayton to Chicago
to trust the civil courts and state governments to resume the function
they had so clearly failed to execute.

As soon as Lee had retreated from Washington, Lincoln had called
Congress back into session, but it had taken weeks for that body to
effectively reconvene. In that time, Lincoln ruled by presidential order
and none too shyly. One problem that had simply evaporated was conscription. The draft was effectively suspended by the flood of volunteers
who oversubscribed state conscription quotas three and four times.
Prominent men who had stayed aloof from the war, such as New York
aristocrat Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., now raised new regiments out of their
own pockets and gladly accepted the commissions to command them.
Another social barrier had also been breached by the war: enlistment of
black regiments on the same pay scale as white units was implemented
without opposition. With one stroke, Lincoln made available at least
another two hundred thousand men for military service.

The disruption of the country's financial markets was only just
being felt as the blockade hampered access to international loans and
made U.S. Treasury bonds sink to their lowest rating ever. Cornelius
Vanderbilt led a group of the wealthiest men in the country to offer the government a gift of fifty million dollars and a loan of a hundred million
more at no interest, an act of patriotism that buoyed the shaken Treasury
and banking system. With that example, the wealthy men of the North
rushed to more than double Vanderbilt's gift; others underwrote the
complete cost of warships. More than a few of these astute men of business recognized the opportunity to boost domestic war industries and
expected a healthy return on their patriotism. Lincoln also set in motion
statehood for the territory of Nevada, whose gushers of gold and silver
were keeping the United States afloat. That the territory did not meet the
minimal constitutional requirement of population was dismissed as a
bagatelle 16

The war imports that had done so much to arm the new armies of
the Union in the first year of the war had been severed at one blow. But
the danger point had already passed in the summer. By then the Northern arsenals and factories were producing a steady flood of first-class
weapons, from small arms to artillery. Four thousand tons of niter had
been stockpiled from British and Chilean imports, guaranteeing the ability to fight for at least a year.17