many of them couldn't fight at all. Slave rebellion? Hell all they'd wanted to do was get north to freedom. Yes, they'd hurt and killed people, but that was only because they were in the way. If he'd had his way. there'd have been no bloodshed at all, but that of course, had disappeared the first day when he'd killed the Farnums. Funny, but he could hardly remember what they'd looked like.
Then it dawned on him. The South's white people were more afraid of him than he was of them. All they could do was kill him, which was likely to happen, but he, or some other Hannibal Watson, would arise again and again until it was all over for the South and her slaves. Lincoln's proclamation had made the freedom of the slaves an inevitability. It might take years, decades, but it would happen. He would never see its fruits, but he could only hope that somewhere, Abigail and their son would.
He was doomed, but it gave him a sense of pleasure. The South was terrified that her slaves would arise and turn on her. Better that the Confederacy thought he was an instrument of that rebellion. Let them wonder, let them worry, he thought harshly. Let them sleep at night with guns by their sides in fear that their nice tame house niggers would rise up in fury and cut their throats, while their brutalized field slaves rampaged and burned their property, preferably with them in it.
Hannibal Watson began to laugh and, outside his cell, his guards heard him and wondered. They began to spread stories that Hannibal Watson, that crazy nigger king from Mississippi, wasn't afraid of anything. Know what that means, they asked around? It means that thousands of dark-skinned men with axes and knives were going to descend on Richmond and free him.
The British expeditionary force to Virginia sailed in two large convoys that met up with each other off the coast of Long Island. Together, they constituted nearly five hundred troop ships and supply vessels, and were accompanied by more than a hundred Royal Navy warships of all sizes. Small, swift, steam sloops and larger frigates scouted ahead and patrolled the flanks of England's armada, while stately ships of the line stayed closer to the heart of the now combined convoys.
Britannia ruled the waves, but experience with American warships and Yankee tenacity had taught her to be prudent. The Union might not have a blue-water fleet, but she had a number of smaller vessels built especially for coastal warfare. The combined British convoy had left New York and now steamed off the entrance to the Delaware River en route to the Chesapeake. There she would disembark her cargo at Norfolk and a handful of other places able to handle large ships.
Admiral Sir Henry Chads, commander of the operation, was only mildly surprised when the scout ships signalled “enemy in sight.” There had been numerous ship sightings as the American coast drew nigh, but they had all been merchants who'd fled as precipitously as a ship could when they'd seen what was bearing down on them.
By this time, of course, Sir Henry had given up on any thought of maintaining secrecy. Thousands of eyes had watched troops disembark from Canada and elsewhere, and there was little doubt that the vast fleet was headed to the Confederacy. Thus, the sighting of the fleet by hostile ships was of no great import.
What was surprising to Chads was any attempt to interfere with his enormous fleet. There was simply nothing in the world that could stand against it. Chads had even hoped for such an attempt, which was why he'd chosen New York for the rendezvous. He'd wanted their damned ironclads to come out so he could destroy them and the growing myth of their invincibility.
“Sir,” said a lieutenant on his staff. “Reports indicate two separate groups of Union vessels. The first consists of a sloop-sized ship and what appear to be four Monitors following. The second appears to be another dozen or so ships of war of various sizes and categories, but wooden-hulled and not ironclads. A few of the wooden ships appear to be frigates.”
Ironclads, Chads thought with distaste, dismissing the wooden ships in the second group. They were nothing but scavengers. His concern was with the four Monitors, and the sloop was doubtless the ironclad ship the Union had been building up the Delaware in Philadelphia. Let them come. Once again, he strode the deck of theWarrior, the largest and most powerful warship in the world. While theWarrior wasthe only iron-hulled ship in his fleet, he could counter with not only her but with other massive ships of the line, including theAgamemnon, Vulture, Eurylaus, Dragon. andPowerful, which steamed in column behind theWarrior. A second, smaller, group of battleships lurked in the heart of the convoy as an unpleasant surprise for anyone who might break through to it. The Royal Navy had a second ironclad in home waters and others under construction. Chads knew with regret that all future ships would be like theWarrior. Or like theMonitor, he thought with a shudder. What an ugly beast.
Chads gave the orders calmly. A half dozen frigates were to detach themselves from the convoy and. along with theWarrior led ships of the line, form a wall to prevent the Union vessels from penetrating into the heart of the convoy and wreaking havoc. The remainder of the Royal Navy warships would watch for a sudden assault from a different direction, although Chads wondered where other Union ships might come from. From all intelligence sources, the heart of the North's navy was bearing down on him from the west. He smiled. He would pluck that living heart from the beast.
Commodore David Glasgow Farragut watched impassively as the might of Britain arrayed itself against his small force. It was an impressive sight. Freed from the constraints of fickle winds, the British steamships moved like ponderous but efficient and skillful dancers as they formed a wall against his fleet. Fleet? Farragut groaned inwardly. To call his assemblage a fleet was like calling a tree a forest, or a puddle a sea.
Along with his flagship, the untriedNew Ironsides, he had theMonitor herself and her sisters-the brand- newHudson, Delaware, andPotomac. Only thePotomac was a two-turret vessel. The other two had a single turret and were identical to the originalMonitor. Thus, he had five ships carrying little more than a score of guns against an enemy who had about as many ships as he had guns. TheNew Ironsides, the largest American ship, only carried sixteen guns: although they were all eleven-inch Dahlgrens. He could only hope that his ships could stand up to the pounding they were going to get as they tried to penetrate the wooden wall forming before him.
So far their greatest achievement had been gathering the squadron together at Philadelphia, where only theIronsides had originally waited. The four Monitors had departed New York disguised as barges. Artificial wooden sides and piles of rubbish had made them appear innocuous.
When-if?-penetration was achieved, the squadron of wooden ships behind his ironclads and under the command of Captain David Dixon Porter would surge into the British convoy and attempt to sink as many as they could and disperse the rest. There was no hope of catching them all, but there was the prayer that the North's wooden warships could do enough damage to cause the British to either withdraw or delay an invasion of the North until the onset of bad winter weather.
As plans went, it wasn't a bad one. Ironically, the obsolete wooden American ships carried many more guns than the ironclads, so they should be able to truly wreak havoc if the ironclads could pierce the British lines. The archaic wooden ships, however, had no place in the coming battle. They would stand back and wait for their opportunity.
As the two fleets drew within range, they opened fire. The thunder of hundreds of British guns drowned out the sound of the few American cannon. Farragut was not a coward. He had first seen combat in the War of 1812, and had been a prize-master before he'd been a teenager, but he quickly realized that his plan to assess the battle from his ship's rigging was the height of folly. Anyone exposed up there would be killed by the hail of metal that was beginning to descend upon her. He retreated belowdecks while her empty rigging was cut to pieces. The ship itself, however, sustained no real damage.
They drew alongside British ships with the Monitors moving as close in as possible. It was then that Farragut realized that the British had learned something from their debacle off New York. British ships paired up and, blessed with overwhelming numbers, flanked the diminutive Monitors. As they had to turn their turrets away to safely reload, they were unable to reload quickly or often, as there was no side where there wasn't a British ship firing on them. The Monitors, however, were so small and so low in the water that the vast majority of shells fired at them were plopping into the ocean, rather than slamming into an armored deck or turret. The smallness of the Monitors also meant that the British ships had to avoid hitting their own sister ships. In this they were not totally successful, and a number of British ships sustained damage from their own side.
The British were unsuccessful in attempts to ram and board. When there was contact, the Monitors were pushed aside like toys and, with astonishing agility for such ungainly looking ships, simply avoided getting too close. On one occasion, a handful of British tars did gain a foothold on theHudson, but thePotomac fired grape at her own sister ship and swept the British away in a bloody froth before they could do any damage.
TheNewIronsides had better hunting. She drew alongside the woodenAgamemnon and sent several
