Part 7

(adapted from material previously posted at Othertimelines.com)

Summary: In the previous six episodes of this series we looked at the causes of the Southern Rebellion War: the early battles of the war itself; the Union’s introduction of ironclad naval vessels in an attempt to get the upper hand over the Confederacy; how General Ethan Allen Hitchcock’s death led to a shakeup in the Fillmore presidential cabinet; the Confederate invasion of Kentucky in the  summer of 1852; the Union counteroffensive that drove out the invaders; the Confederates’ stunning victory at the Battle of  Knoxville; the ill-fated attempt by Confederate spies to start an uprising in Indiana; the rise of Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln to national political prominence; and the Confederate capture of the Kentucky towns of Monticello and Williamstown in April, 1853. In this chapter we’ll recall the 47^th New Hampshire Infantry’s baptism of fire as the Union Army launched its drive to retake  Williamstown and Monticello back from the Confederates and push the Confederate Army out of Kentucky for good.

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To say that the activation of the 47^th New Hampshire Infantry was greeted with skepticism would barely scratch the surface of the  regiment’s struggle for acceptance by their fellow Union troops. As more than one historian has aptly observed, the men of the 47^th were fighting two wars-- one against the Confederacy, the other against racists within their own army. Long before they ever faced a single Confederate bullet they had to endure taunting and racial epithets  from white soldiers and officers who felt black men didn’t belong in the blue uniform of the Union Army. In their first weeks drilling as a unit, there was rarely if ever a day which went by for the 47^th’s  recruits without at least one white man(and too often more than one) yelling at the regiment’s drill sergeants to "get those n*****s off the field!" But if the bigots thought their heckling would drive the recruits away, they were seriously mistaken; it only motivated the  black men to strive that much harder to prove their fitness to serve in the Union Army’s ranks.

The officer chosen to command the 47^th was a former Boston  native who before the war had been an instructor at West Point. At first he was reluctant to accept his new post, but his attitudes on that score changed once he’d had the opportunity to meet some of the new recruits; seeing their dedication to making themselves into good  soldiers and ridding the country of the scourge of slavery, he was moved in a short time to become their resolute advocate as well as  their commander. More than one Union officer who disparaged the 47^th Infantry’s fitness for combat wound up paying for such an insult by getting slugged in the teeth or reprimanded for conduct unbecoming a soldier in the line of duty. Often as not, the unlucky men who were the targets of these reprimands charged that the 47^th’s commander was  issuing them purely out of spite, but accusations like that are much easier to make than to prove¹ and all efforts to get the reprimands overturned came to nothing. Many officers threatened to resign their commissions in protest, but only a handful made good on this threat; most merely grumbled in private, and some later changed their views about the 47^th and became supporters of the regiment.

The men of the 47^th were itching to get into combat, but at first their role in the Union war effort was confined largely to escorting supply wagons and guarding Confederate POWs. This rankled the black soldiers no end, and the 47^th’s commanding officer resolved to change that state of affairs no matter what it took. By August of 1853, the pressure on President Fillmore to let the 47^th take a more active part in the struggle against the Confederacy had gotten to a point where he was at last obliged to sanction their deployment in a major combat operation-- to be more specific, the Union offensive to drive Confederate troops out of Williamstown and Monticello.

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The rest of the Union Army wasn’t exactly sitting on its hands waiting for the issue of the 47^th New Hampshire Infantry’s role to be settled. Along the Virginia-West Virginia border, which at the start of 1853 had been relatively quiet, fighting flared up anew as Union and Confederate infantry squads clashed in probing operations meant to gauge the respective strengths and weaknesses of the two armies’ frontier defenses in anticipation of a possible new major engagement in that region during the summer or fall. In Kansas, the situation was as chaotic as ever as Union troops chased and fought pro-slavery guerrillas. Neighboring Missouri had its own pro-slavery insurgency to contend with; in some parts of that state more Union troops were being killed in action against the insurgents than had died fighting Confederate regulars on the Virginia front. In the Southwest, Union Army garrisons originally established to defend settlements in the Arizona and New Mexico territories and towns in the state of Texas from Indian attack were now obliged to take on the added obligation of preventing Confederate special forces from stirring up unrest on the United States border with Mexico.

There were even some skirmishes between Union and Confederate troops at, of all places, the Canadian frontier. Early in the war, a group of English-Canadians sympathetic to the Southern cause had approached Confederate president Robert Toombs about the notion of providing a safe harbor for Confederate agents to mount raids into New England and upstate New York; intrigued by this idea, Toombs had been quick to accept the Canadian sympathizers’ offer, and after a period where those raids had been temporarily brought to a halt due to Confederate defeats elsewhere they resumed with a vengeance in July of 1853. One such raid would be recorded in the annals of U.S. history as the only time in the entire Southern Rebellion War when Confederate forces succeeded in attaining(albeit only very briefly) a foothold north of the Potomac. On July 22^nd, a party of Confederate irregulars slipped across the U.S.-Canadian border just before dawn and made their way to the Vermont town of St. Albans, where they seized the town hall and local telegraph office and occupied them for nearly six hours being put to rout by state militia units.

The St. Albans raid did little to alter the course of the Southern Rebellion War, but had a major impact on relations between  the United States and Great Britain. Canada was still part of the British Empire at the time, and in an era when memories of the War of 1812 were still fresh in the minds of the American people, the fact that Confederate forces had mounted an attack on Union soil from British territory was regarded by some of the more hard-line anti-British factions of the Union as evidence Britain had decided to get off the fence and throw in its lot with the Confederacy. A diplomatic row ensued between Washington and London at the height of which there were genuine-- if greatly misplaced --fears a new Anglo-American war might soon break out in North America. It took weeks of delicate negotiations, much of them conducted by telegram, to defuse the standoff. And even after the crisis had passed America remained somewhat suspicious of the British presence on her northern neighbor’s soil; it wasn’t until April of 1858, nearly four years after the Southern Rebellion War had ended, that American troops on the U.S.-Canadian border finally resumed their normal peacetime duties.

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On August 17^th, 1853 the 47^th New Hampshire Infantry received its baptism of fire in an engagement with Confederate troops near the  outskirts of Williamstown, Kentucky. What had started out as just a probing expedition to gauge the strength of Confederate Army defenses surrounding Williamstown soon turned into a full-blown firefight as Confederate troops unleashed a murderous barrage of rifle and pistol fire on the black Union troops, who immediately returned fire. White Union soldiers who initially had objected to having to work alongside the men of the 47^th quickly forgot about such objections in the face of the Confederate fusillade and concentrated their energies on the task of defending their comrades-in-arms.

In so doing, they created an opportunity for additional Union troops to join in the fray and strike at the Confederates’ vulnerable eastern flank near Williamstown. By 10:00 AM on the morning of August 19^th Union forces controlled most of the town and were waging vicious house-to-house skirmishes with Confederate troops for possession of  the rest. In desperation the local Confederate Army commander sent an urgent telegram to his counterpart in Monticello requesting relief at the earliest possible moment.

But the Confederate garrison in Monticello had its own set of problems to worry about-- Union sympathizers from neighboring towns and villages had of late been infiltrating Monticello’s population and instigating guerrilla attacks on Confederate soldiers in that city. A major consequence of these guerrilla raids was that they tied down men and units who might otherwise have been available to oppose the Union drive towards Monticello or relieve the besieged Confederate regulars at Williamstown.

On August 22^nd the last pocket of Confederate resistance in Williamstown surrendered to the Union Army. When word of the surrender reached the Confederate occupation troops in Monticello that evening, it shattered their morale, for they understood that the Union capture  of Williamstown meant the fall of Monticello wasn’t far behind. Sure enough, on August 25^th Union infantry and cavalry regiments encircled Monticello; Confederate defenses there collapsed after just 12 hours. President Robert Toombs greeted the news of the Union victories at Monticello and Williamstown with barely restrained horror, because he understood as few other civilian leaders did that what had happened at  those towns represented the end of Charleston’s last hope for bringing Kentucky into the Confederate orbit.

Toombs’ longtime nemesis Jefferson Davis was only too willing to lend his voice to the angry chorus of detractors who blamed the CRA² chief executive for the Confederate Army’s back-to-back defeats up in Williamstown and Monticello. For over three weeks after Monticello was captured by the Union Army, the Charleston Mercury published editorial after editorial labeling Toombs as a half-wit at best and a traitor to the Confederate Republic at worst. The newspaper’s anti-Toombs stance was now so strident that before the end of the year, Davis would find himself in danger of being arrested for treason.

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The events at Williamstown and Monticello not only killed  the dream of making Kentucky a Confederate state, they constituted a dire omen for those states that actually were part of the Confederacy.  As what was left of the Confederate expeditionary force to Kentucky retreated into Tennessee and Virginia, the threat of a deep Union Army thrust into Confederate territory-- something that had haunted the CR Army general staff in Charleston from the minute the first shots were  fired at Fort Sumter --now stared the Confederate Republic square in the face. The Confederate Navy, which had been operating at something of a disadvantage all along, found itself slowly crumbling to pieces at exactly the very moment in the war when it was most needed to hold together. Blockade runners found it increasingly difficult to sneak past the Union Navy blockade lines to deliver the supplies which the Republic needed; eventually, they would find it impossible.

Within a month after the Union capture of Williamstown the 47^th New Hampshire Infantry was once again on the march, this time as part of a renewed Union campaign to capture Knoxville. In early October of 1853 the long-awaited decisive struggle for control of the state of Virginia finally began as Union regiments under the command of veteran officer and newly minted general William T. Sherman struck at Confederate troops on the Virginia-West Virginia frontier along three fronts. And the bad news just kept coming for President Toombs and his cabinet: on October 11^th, 1853 Toombs’ Secretary of State, a former lawyer named Judah P. Benjamin, had his last hopes of British intervention on the Confederacy’s behalf crushed when he received a letter from his top representative in London informing him that the British government had, after over a year of raucous debate within the prime minister’s cabinet, decided not to grant the Confederate Republic recognition as an independent state.

At the beginning of the Southern Rebellion War, volunteers for the Union Army had gone off to battle with the enthusiastic if somewhat premature slogan "On To Charleston!"³ Now, in light of the most recent developments on the battlefield, the phrase was sounding less like a war cry than like a prophecy of future events....