Dixie Victorious: An Alternate history of the Civil War Read online

  The British author, Andrew Uffindell, examines just how close Lincoln came to failing to stave off such a war and then illustrates the appalling consequences of such a failure for the Union. Wade Dudley then employs the confrontation of the U.S.S. Monitor and the C.S.S. Virginia to show how close was the Union victory and the consequences of a Confederate counter-blockade had the battle tipped the other way. David Keithly draws a sequences of events pivoting on the famous Order #191 which gave away Lee’s plan of operation to McClellan. What if the order had not been lost? Michael Hathaway pinpoints another Northern crisis, one consistently overlooked by students of the war. The United States Government came perilously close in 1862 to outright financial collapse. A Southern victory in Maryland in September 1862 might have set off a crash that would have brought the war to a halt for a failure to pay for it.

  By 1863 Union prospects were looking up, but still weaknesses persisted that provided mortal openings for the South. Luck was there as well. James Arnold supplies the tourniquet that would have saved Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh, saving that Southern lion for a contest with U.S. Grant outside of Vicksburg. Edward Longacre wipes away Stuart’s disastrous attempt to ride around the Army of the Potomac before Gettysburg. Instead Lee keeps him close. Then Lee has not only powerful fists but keen eyes as well in Pennsylvania. John Burtt removes detested Braxton Bragg from command of the Army of Tennessee after his unexploited victory at Chickamauga and puts Longstreet in his place to wrestle with Grant in a grinding campaign in the mountains around Chattanooga.

  Finally 1864, the last year of opportunity for the South, still offered chances for the Confederacy. They all hinged on the Union’s 1864 Presidential and Congressional elections. Lincoln’s victory against the Peace Democrats depended on continued success. A military disaster or a major Southern initiative to checkmate the North politically would surely have removed the single most critical player in the war — Lincoln. This author has created a scenario based on the proposal of Irish-born Major General Patrick Cleburne to redress the South’s ruinous manpower losses by conscripting slaves and giving them their freedom. A golden chance was there to change the terms of the war totally, to crack the Northern crusade, and push the direction of race relations along an entirely new path. Cyril Lagvanec takes the reader to the seldom visited Trans-Mississippi Theater of operations to demonstrate the consequences of a Northern debacle during the Red River Campaign. Finally, Major Kevin Kiley, U.S.M.C., loosens Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Campaign to drive Washington into panic and break the siege of Petersburg.

  These excursions into the myth of the Lost Cause show that its allure was not entirely wishful thinking. The South came achingly near to victory as the scales trembled in balance again and again. Tip the balance, dear reader, and follow these alternative roads of history to Southern independence.

  Clarifications

  The ten chapters in this book do not form a continuous thread or single plot line. Rather they are the stories woven by ten authors each charged with examining a different period or episode of the Civil War in light of the very real potential for different outcomes. Each is self-contained within its own alternate reality.

  Our historical accounts of this alternate reality naturally need their own explanatory references, which appear in the footnotes at the end of each chapter. The use of these “alternate reality” notes, of course, poses a risk to the unwary reader who may make strenuous efforts to acquire a new and fascinating source. To avoid an epidemic of frustrating and futile searches, the “alternate notes” are indicated with an asterisk (*) before the number. All works appearing in the bibliographies included separately in each chapter are, however, “real.”

  Peter G. Tsouras

  Lt. Col. (U.S.A.R., ret)

  Alexandria, Virginia

  2004

  1

  “HELL ON EARTH”

  Anglo-French Intervention in the Civil War

  Andrew Uffindell

  When Queen Victoria’s husband was killed in a tragic accident on October 1, 1860, few guessed the immensity of the repercussions. The couple were staying with their daughter, Vicky, at Coburg in Germany and that fateful afternoon Prince Albert set off alone in his carriage to keep an appointment. Suddenly, his horses went out of control, dashed furiously down the road towards a railroad crossing and crashed into a wagon that was waiting for a train to pass. The collision overturned the carriage, injured the coachman and killed Albert instantly. Britain lost a wise and devoted statesman who might have managed to steer the country clear of intervention in the terrible conflict that split the United States the following year.

  The War of Northern Aggression

  The confrontation between the Northern and Southern States of America exploded into hostilities with the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12, 1861. Without European intervention, the war would probably have ended in a Confederate defeat, given the North’s overwhelmingly superior resources and the disjointed nature of the Confederacy itself. Nor was it inevitable that Britain and France should have become involved. Initially, they proclaimed their neutrality and recognized the Confederacy only as a belligerent. Even this logical and limited move was resented by the North, which feared that it would be followed by recognition of the Confederacy’s independence, and by mediation in the conflict.

  Public opinion in Britain was not unanimous. The British ruling classes naturally sympathized more with the Southern aristocracy than with the democratic North; they also feared the growing power of the United States and its potential threat to the integrity of British North America. Both of these dangers could be averted by the establishment of an independent Confederacy. But many British workers favored the Union and the situation was further complicated by the country’s increased reliance on wheat imports from the North following a string of crop failures in Europe. Britain was less dependent on Southern cotton, for she already had a surplus and could find alternative sources in Egypt and India.

  The Trent Incident

  Britain’s tense relations with the North dramatically worsened when Captain Charles Wilkes of the U.S. frigate San Jacinto intercepted the British mail packet Trent on November 8, 1861, as it sailed from the Spanish port of Havana in Cuba. He was acting on his own initiative and was intent on arresting the two Confederate commissioners who were on board, James Mason and John Slidell. But the commander of Wilkes’s boarding party, Lieutenant Fairfax, was shot and wounded by an irate passenger and two Britons were killed when the Americans returned fire.

  Wilkes returned triumphantly with his two captured commissioners. His audacious action turned him into a popular hero overnight, but also plunged Lincoln’s government into the worst crisis it had yet faced. The news of the murderous deed, which amounted to an act of war, reached London on November 25. Queen Victoria wrote that British blood “boiled” and Viscount Palmerston, her 77-year-old Prime Minister, was outraged. “You may stand for this,” he raged at his Cabinet, “but damned if I will!”

  The Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, drafted a blunt memorandum to Lord Lyons, the British Minister in Washington, demanding the release of the captives and an apology. The blunt message left little room for negotiation and made it impossible for the North to back down without massive loss of face. Lincoln was desperate to stick to “one war at a time” and avoid a potentially disastrous conflict with Britain while he was fighting the Confederacy. But politically he had little room for manoeuvre. Charles Francis Adams Jr, the son of the American Minister to Britain, was studying law in Boston and wrote 50 years later:

  “I do not remember in the whole course of the half-century’s retrospect… any occurrence in which the American people were so completely swept off their feet, for the moment losing possession of their senses, as during the weeks which immediately followed the seizure of Mason and Slidell.”1

  William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, threatened on December 16 that, if the Union was forced into
a war with Britain, “we will wrap the whole world in flames.”2 But in the absence of an apology, neither Seward’s bluster nor a belated assurance that Wilkes had acted without authorization could dissuade an aggrieved Britain from recognizing the Confederacy as an independent nation. At the same time, Britain demanded that both North and South submit to European mediation to end the war and prevent any further injury to British subjects or commercial interests.

  Lincoln tried to play for time, possibly hoping to negotiate once the popular outcry in the North had abated. But Confederate agents operating covertly in British North America had already seized their opportunity to try and precipitate a conflict by raiding Union towns immediately across the frontier. The most notorious of these incidents occurred on December 8 when a gang attacked the town of Lowell, Vermont, robbed its banks and killed three citizens in the gunfight that followed. They then escaped back across the border. A nearby detachment of the 2d Cavalry immediately rode off in pursuit under Second Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer, who had been sent a week earlier to help reconnoiter the frontier as a response to the raids. The hot-headed Custer not only failed to apprehend the culprits, but advanced so far across the border that he was holed up inside a farm by Canadian militia and had to surrender his surviving men after a desperate shoot-out. He spent the next two years in a British prisoner-of-war camp on the South Atlantic island of St Helena3 and was afterwards court-martialled and dismissed from the Army. He then pursued a seemingly highly-successful business career but died in prison in 1882 after being found guilty of fraud.4

  War between Britain and the North was now unavoidable as the escalating border incidents sparked a series of clashes between British and Union troops. The British authorities genuinely wanted to prevent the raids, but lacked the manpower to cover the entire frontier. War officially broke out on January 20, 1862.

  The English novelist Anthony Trollope had been touring the United States as the crisis erupted and was appalled:

  “These people speak our language, use our prayers, read our books, are ruled by our laws, dress themselves in our image, are warm with our blood. They have all our virtues; and their vices are our own too, loudly as we call out against them. They are our sons and our daughters, the source of our greatest pride, and as we grow old they should be the staff of our age. Such a war as we shall now wage with the States will be an unloosing of hell on earth.”5

  France immediately followed Britain into the conflict. The French Emperor Napoleon III wanted to revive popular support for his regime and knew the effect that military glory would have on Paris. He was once asked whether it was difficult to rule the French and replied: “Oh no! Nothing is easier. You simply need to give them a war every four years.”

  War with the North would also enable him to establish French influence and commercial advantages in the New World. In a speech to the United States Congress in 1823, President James Monroe had warned France and Spain not to try to interfere in the Americas. But the War between the States made it impossible to enforce the Monroe Doctrine and a Union defeat could prevent it from being revived. By actively intervening in the conflict, Napoleon III could ensure the survival of the Confederacy as a key French ally and commercial partner.

  Anglo-French relations had fluctuated since Napoleon Ill’s establishment of the Second Empire in 1852. French forces had fought alongside the British against the Russians in the Crimean War (1854–6) and against the Chinese during the Expedition to Peking in 1860. But the British distrusted Napoleon III’s devious diplomacy and had become alarmed by his willingness to use force to revise the European settlement of 1815 in France’s favor, as demonstrated by his war with Austria in northern Italy in 1859. They were also concerned at French military and naval power and its implications for the security of the British Isles. Nonetheless, a commercial treaty had improved relations in 1860 and Napoleon III was keen to strengthen the alliance.

  For their part, the British welcomed French moral, diplomatic and naval support against the North, but declined Napoleon III’s offer of French troops to help defend their North American colonies. They feared that he had ambitions to re-establish a permanent French foothold there, for France had owned vast territories along the St Lawrence and Mississippi rivers until their cession to Britain and Spain under the Treaty of Paris in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years’ War.

  In fact, Napoleon III was more interested in Latin America. President Benito Juarez of Mexico had postponed the payment of all public debts, including indemnities owed to foreigners for losses suffered during his country’s civil war. In January 1862, shortly before Britain and France went to war with the North, a French, Spanish and British force occupied Vera Cruz on the eastern coast of Mexico, with the British contributing a battalion of the Royal Marines and a squadron of ships under Commodore Hugh Dunlop. The British and Spanish withdrew in April after forcing Mexico to resume its outstanding payments, but the French remained, intent on establishing a Mexican Empire as a French satellite, and were reinforced to a total of 20,000 men under General Elie Forey.

  The long-term implications of the French presence in Mexico caused some unease within the Confederacy, but were dismissed when Napoleon III concluded a formal alliance with the South and sent General Achille Bazaine with 10,000 French troops to help defend Richmond. The French soldiers completely won over the people of the South and gained the admiration even of their enemies for their élan in attack. They were veterans with recent combat experience in the Crimea, Algeria and northern Italy and boosted both the morale and training of their Confederate allies. Even today, French influence pervades Virginia.

  The British were more cautious than the French and initially sought to avoid a formal alliance with the Confederacy, partly for domestic reasons. They planned simply to fight a parallel war to force an end to both conflicts, but soon realized that they could not defeat the Union without co-ordinating their operations more closely with the Confederate war effort.

  Defensive Preparations in British North America

  Britain had to prosecute the war simultaneously in several distinct, but interlocking, theatres. Her main offensive weapon was the Royal Navy, which would blockade the Atlantic coast, hunt down hostile ships around the world and attack the Pacific Seaboard using troops drawn from the Far East. But she also had to look immediately to preparing the defences of her highly vulnerable North American possessions against the threat of invasion.

  British North America consisted of a collection of territories. In the east were the province of Newfoundland and the Maritime Provinces of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Further west was the Province of Canada, which by uniting the French-speaking region around the city of Quebec and the English-speaking area based on Toronto contained 75 per cent of the population of British North America. On the Pacific coast lay the colonies of British Columbia and Vancouver Island, while the Hudson Bay Company held the vast territories in between.

  The security of these vast areas depended on their waterways, for road transport was difficult and the rail network limited. The British relied above all on the St Lawrence River, not just as a line of defence, but also as an avenue of communications by which trade and military supplies could be brought to Quebec, Montreal and the Great Lakes. The St Lawrence was the jugular vein of British North America, but it was often dangerously close to the American frontier, particularly west of Montreal and also where the State of Maine projected northwards like an incisor tooth.

  The St Lawrence had been supplemented by a system of canals to bypass rapids, but many of these were exposed on the southern side of the river and even those on the northern bank often lay within artillery range of American territory. Their dimensions also limited the size of ships that the British could pass up the St Lawrence. This, in turn, meant that the British could not hope for naval superiority on the Great Lakes. They had dismantled their warships posted there, following the Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1817 to neutralize the Lakes. They had no
t even kept the permitted number of gunboats and, although they could mount guns on commercial vessels, they therefore had nothing with which to counter the U.S.S. Michigan, which was based at Buffalo as a recruiting vessel and which in fact exceeded the agreed limits. A further problem was that even the easternmost of the Great Lakes was 600 miles from the Atlantic. Given the ease with which the St Lawrence could be cut, it was pointless to attempt a serious defence of the Lakes or, indeed, of any position west of Montreal.

  Despite this depressing outlook, the British had two significant advantages. Firstly, they had fortified the frontier. It was unfortunate that several of the fortifications had been allowed to slip out of use, with some outposts being used as juvenile reformatories and Fort Maiden, near Detroit, as a lunatic asylum. Furthermore, the strength of the 30-year-old citadel at Quebec, “the Gibraltar of America,” had been undermined by the development of modern artillery. Even so, the British side of the border was unquestionably better fortified than the American.

  The British could also count on the bitterness and duration of the North American winter. The freezing-over of the St Lawrence prevented direct communication with Britain by sea between December and April. But the difficulties imposed by the winter would also make it impossible for the Americans to do more than blockade a well-supplied fortress like Quebec and limited the time available during the rest of the year for an actual siege.

  There had been only 4,300 regular troops in British North America on the outbreak of the War between the States, but they were quickly reinforced. In July 1861, the Great Eastern, the largest ship in the world, carried 2,144 officers and men, 473 women and children and 122 horses in a single voyage, a hitherto unimaginable figure. The ship steamed across the Atlantic in a record time of eight days and six hours thanks to her keen young captain, the 30-year-old James Kennedy, who refused to reduce speed when he ran into fog. He simply dodged the icebergs and narrowly avoided colliding with the Cunard liner Arabia.