Southern Sea Hawk Read online

  Once he believed in all that West Point stood for—the honor of national service, the duty of protecting home and hearth, the comradeship of warriors. And so he supported his son Oliver when he sought senatorial appointment to the academy. He even envied Oliver the chance to come of age at this grand institution of learning in company with the brave and the strong. There was no academy when he joined the navy back in 1826. No classes in engineering, tactics, leadership. Just a dank midshipman’s berth on the Old Lex and officers looking to bust you out of their ranks and down into the fo’castle with the jacks.

  “Father?” The word jolts him from his thoughts.

  The superintendent had dismissed the regiment while he was brooding, and now Citizen Semmes looks into the rosy face of a stocky youth. The boy seems almost giddy with surprise.

  “Mother wrote that you were in the North, but I did not expect …”

  He gives his son his right hand. The boy takes it, hesitates long enough to find his father’s eyes, then embraces him for several seconds. A stiff hug. But a hug nonetheless.

  “Ollie.”

  “It is so good to see you, sir.”

  “You have been much on my mind, Son.”

  “And you on mine. It is so odd to see you out of uniform. Have you gone back to practicing law in Mobile?” “Let us walk somewhere less public.”

  Semmes fixes his gaze on a forest of bare trees in the distance. “I have an hour before mess.”

  The young man with the long arms and thick chest of a wrestling champion leads his father to a wooded path. It traverses a bluff that overlooks the river hundreds of feet below and Cold Springs on the opposite shore. There’s a cannon foundry over there, and the smell of coal smoke and smelting iron hangs above the river.

  “They work day and night,” says the boy when he sees his father eyeing the cannon manufactory. “There is a rumor that the engineers have begun employing a thing called rifling in their cannons. It is like screw threads inside the barrel. The threads spin the shell as it leaves, increasing the velocity, range and accuracy of the projectile.”

  His shoulders hunch up slightly. “The South cannot yet produce even smooth-bore weapons.”

  The boy sees the scowl on his father’s face, changes the subject.

  “You look good in civies, Father.”

  “I look naked.”

  The boy shrugs. He meant to reach out to his father, but he has offended. “Sorry, sir.”

  “No. It is I who should be sorry, Son.” He grinds his back teeth, gives a tip of his mustache a sharp twist. “I owe you more than I have given, Ollie.”

  “These are difficult times.”

  “Aye.” He hears Maude in his own voice, and he hopes that she will stand by him now. Lord, he hopes he’s about to say the right thing.

  “I am not reading law, Son. I serve the South. Mr. Davis has made me one of four commanders in his new navy.”

  Oliver pauses on the trail, bends his head, puts his left hand to his mouth and squeezes his upper lip to stifle strong emotions.

  “When?”

  Semmes takes a step ahead. Stops. Then wheels to look at his son the cadet. “It has been some two months.”

  “Why did you not write to me of this? Your decision would have made my own choice of service so much easier.”

  He shifts his weight from the left foot to the right then tugs on his mustache again.

  “I thought it best not to unduly influence you right much.”

  Facing off with the father, the boy extends his arms, the wrestler testing his opposite.

  “You’re my father. How can you not influence me? By denying me the whole truth, you influence me. Don’t you see that?”

  He adjusts the maroon muffler at his neck and clears his throat. “It is not that simple, Ol.”

  “Why not? You join the Confederates, and you don’t tell me?”

  “Some things are better left private.”

  He starts to walk again. The boy pursues.

  “From your family?”

  “From the world, Son.”

  Semmes stops again, turns his back on his son, gazes off toward the gothic towers of the academy.

  Oliver puts his hand to his upper lip once more, squeezes, stares into the purple haze gathering over the Hudson as the sun sets. At last his hand drops. He casts his father a sidelong glance.

  “You’re a Reb agent, aren’t you? That’s why you’re here in the North.”

  He swallows a mouthful of saliva.

  “It is a right dirty piece of business, Ol. It might even be an evil business. I hate every second of it except this chance to see you. I have come north to buy cases of powder, service revolvers, muskets from the Du Ponts, Sam Colt and their competitors. Then I ship my purchases off to Beauregard in Charleston with the word “Bibles” stamped on the packing cases. Lots of packing cases. Now they want me to buy a fleet of steamers.”

  Oliver’s eyes widen. The sun has set. A fog of coal smoke and smelting cannon iron rises over the river from Cold Spring. The hour of the cadets’ mess approaches.

  “What next, Father?”

  4

  District of Columbia

  MID-APRIL, 1861

  Gideon Welles bolts the lock on Room 8 in the Willard Hotel, turns toward the dresser mirror, sighs at the sight of his own image as he peels the gray wig off his pale dome.

  “I swear if I hear one more knock on this door tonight, I’m through with Washington.”

  Thirty years ago when he lost his hair and started wearing wigs, he thought that his toupees, with a spit curl cocked over the left eye and thick curls roiling over his ears and neck, made him look stentorian or knightly. He pictured Seneca and Lancelot, and felt like one of the Chosen. But now with the wig off and the bushy white beard hiding his neck and collar, he thinks he looks like Father Christmas.

  “Good Lord, how could Lincoln have chosen a man who looks like this to serve him?” He loosens the red tie at his throat. “I’m a clown. I’ll be the darling of the political cartoonists within weeks.” Why not just catch the next train back to Hartford, Mary Jane and the children, avoid the whole wretched catastrophe. Secretary of the Navy! What do I know about ships or Horatio Nelson types? I’m a newsman.

  He whips the loosened tie from beneath his collar, flings it across the room onto the bed. Then he shambles in the same direction, his bunions aching with each step. The prospect of peeling out of his suspenders and all the rest seems entirely too daunting. He might just sleep in his clothes. It has been a long day trying to find competent and trustworthy officers to replace the more than one hundred and fifty senior men who resigned to join the South. And a longer night warding off the legions of opportunists and office seekers stalking the corridors of the Willard, currying favor. Total madmen, liars, scalawags. Someone even tried to sell him ships made of iron. Imagine. A navy of iron ships. They’d sink like stones.

  After his large and weighty frame crumples on top of the lilac bedspread, he reaches to douse the flame in the oil lamp on the bed stand. He catches sight of the small tintype of the president, the man he worked so hard to elect, propped against the lamp. Photographs amuse and scare him; they seem to have the power to stop time and steal souls.

  But that’s not what the newly frocked Secretary of the Navy is thinking just now. He closes his eyes and begins to laugh aloud. A long explosion of sad and giddy mirth rises out of his belly as an odd discovery strikes him. He pictures the key players in the Lincoln cabinet. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, a free-soiler from Ohio and one of Lincoln’s rivals for the nomination, looks like a bull-necked prize fighter. Si Cameron at War, a Pennsylvanian with the hooked nose of a hunting hawk and his own chip on the shoulder about having lost the nomination to Lincoln. Ed Bates, yet another of Lincoln’s rivals, has already started presiding over the Attorney General’s office with the handsome looks you see in drawings of Caesar. Worst of all, Bill Seward. The man who had been chief among Lincoln’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination is now Secretary of State. The former governor of New York and senator has the sharp looks of a fox or Iago. He and Welles have clashed at smoky political caucuses for well over a decade.

  What a snake pit! None of us are here because of our talents. Lincoln has appointed us to consolidate the party and pay off political debts. And I am the president’s only friend. His older, uglier shadow. We must be jokes to these boys.

  He’s still laughing at the sheer madness of it all when two sharp raps sting his door.

  “What the hell is going on in there, Welles? Are you thumping a tart?”

  Seward. Jesus Christ!

  “It’s eleven o’clock. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  More knocks. Harder now.

  “Open up. I need to talk to you! This can’t wait.”

  He rolls out of bed, wobbles to the dresser to fetch his wig.

  “Come on, Gideon. Where in Jesus’ name are you?”

  “Present.” He swings open the door, then presses the wig to his temples with both hands.

  Seward, followed by his son Frederick, a slick-haired rat in a suit, backs him into his own room.

  “What the hell is this?”

  Seward waves a telegram. “You’ve countermanded the president’s orders. Nothing’s happening in Brooklyn. The navy yard will not let David Porter take the Powhatan because the yard’s got an order from you for some Captain Mercer to take Powhatan as flagship on this ridiculous expedition to rescue Fort Sumter.”

  Frederick slams the door.

  “What? Porter? Who’s Porter?” A chasm opens beneath his heart. “He’s a lieutenant. On a secret mission. That’s all you need to know.” He bites his lower lip.

  “A mere lieutenant has been sent without my knowledge
to take command from a seasoned captain of one of the few first-rate ships I have that is not off gallivanting around the globe somewhere? The one ship that can assure the success of our expedition to resupply the troops at Sumter? The navy’s ship? My ship? How in God’s name? What secret mission? Tell me. What right do you have to order my navy …?”

  He begins gathering himself, rising erect like a waking giant to tower over Seward.

  The Secretary of State takes an unconscious step backward, bumps into his son. It makes him jump.

  “Stop. Stop acting like a fool, Gideon. It’s not your navy. It’s the president’s navy.”

  “How can this happen? The president approved sending Mercer and the Powhatan to Sumter!”

  Seward smiles a tight-lipped grin. “And then he signed a secret order to have Porter take the Powhatan. He overruled you!”

  He feels a knife sink between his shoulders and a great rushing of blood in his veins. His bunions seem to swell to bursting within his shoes.

  “Everything would have worked out just fine. But you had to go and send a second set of orders to the Brooklyn Navy Yard underscoring your earlier orders for the Powhatan to go to Sumter. Now Brooklyn’s doing nothing because they have three sets of contradictory orders. Great show, Gideon.”

  “You shat on your president, Mr. Secretary,” says Frederick.

  The little weasel. His fists tighten. “We’ll see about that!”

  The president squeezes his chin with his hand, paces the length of the parlor in the East Wing and waits for the butler to finish stoking the fire and quit the room. He’s still in his black suit trousers, but his white shirttail sticks out around his pants hangers. His shoes are off. The sound of his silk socks on the oak floor makes a strange squeak.

  Welles, Seward, the rodent son and a naval officer named Stringham, who Welles has brought along as a witness, stand just inside the doorway to the parlor handing their coats and hats to a small platoon of uniformed guards.

  “Sit, gentlemen,” says the president when the guards close the door and leave them alone. Lincoln motions to the divan and cushioned parlor chairs arching around an oriental carpet in the center of the room. The president’s own chair is the huge leather wing-back affair facing the fire.

  The case clock chimes twelve thirty.

  “Excuse my appearance. Mrs. Lincoln says that I have a peculiar tendency to revert to my wood-splitting roots behind closed doors. She may be righter than right. You can take the boy out of Kentuck, but you can’t take Kentuck out of the boy …”

  The president pauses in his pacing in front of the fire, seems to think about sitting in his chair, then changes his mind, grabs a poker, reshuffles the logs in the fire.

  “Now that’s better, isn’t it?” He smiles to himself, perhaps amused that he has not lost the knack for fire building. “I confess to a certain fondness to those first eight years of life I spent in Kentuck. We didn’t have two coppers to rub together … but still those woods and hills and creeks were all a boy … But I’m rambling, gentlemen. It has been something of a long day, and by the looks on your faces it is not quite over. Or … are we about to greet the morn with some new and wondrous tale of hard times in our little frontier town on the backwaters of Chesapeake Bay?”

  Settled on the divan, Seward and the rodent cross their arms over their chests and cast each other pained looks in judgment of the president’s homey monologue.

  Gideon Welles cranes forward on the edge of his seat.

  “Mr. President, I fear the relief mission to Fort Sumter is in grave danger.”

  Lincoln pivots away from the fireplace, jerks his head to one side as if someone has just fired a shot over his shoulder. “Come again, Gideon?”

  “No such thing, Mr. President. The relief convoy has already departed Brooklyn for Charleston. All is as it should be. The Secretary has just gotten himself into a snit about one ship that will not be making the journey.”

  Welles’ eyes pop. “Who started the snit, Seward? Who came beating on my door at eleven o’clock at night to complain that I have balled up the orders for a secret mission with the Powhatan? I need that ship. Sumter needs that ship. The whole operation …”

  The president crosses the room and puts his hand on Welles’ shoulder.

  “Take a deep breath, Gideon. What is this Powhatan? Powhatan, Pocahantas, Pawnee? I’m afraid I can’t keep the names of these ships straight in my head.”

  “She’s a side-wheel frigate, Saranac class,” says the rodent.

  Lincoln either doesn’t hear or pretends not to.

  “What is she, Gideon?”

  Welles explains. Powhatan was one of his, er … the navy’s, fastest warships. A steam frigate carrying sixteen heavy guns. A floating fortress. Her presence covering the landing of men and supplies at Sumter would be intimidating enough to General Beauregard’s Rebels in Ft. Moultrie to make them think twice, and then twice more, before trying to interfere with the resupply of Sumter by firing off any of their peashooters at the operation. With Sumter resupplied and the Powhatan on station at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, the Federals could keep the port closed indefinitely.

  Powhatan is just the ship to make South Carolina and the other seceeding states realize that picking a fight with the United States of America would be futile, suicidal. Without the Powhatan, the resupply of Sumter would look like a half-hearted joke, an armada of mostly tugs and troop barges. The president knows this. He approved sending the Powhatan to Sumter under Captain Mercer. Stringham witnessed the order.

  “That’s ridiculous. A waste of a ship.” Seward’s on his feet. “The whole Sumter rescue is a shot in the dark, Mr. President. You know that. We’ve got bigger things to worry about than one puny fort in South Carolina. No matter what we do, it’s lost. The Rebs have it surrounded. We give up Sumter now, or we give up Sumter later. It doesn’t matter. Sumter has no strategic value if a war breaks out. Secretary Welles is focused on a short-term operation of little moment. As we have discussed, sir, the Powhatan is the lynch pin in a long-term, top-secret strategic plan known only to you, me and the operatives. You have signed her orders yourself. Look.”

  “I did?” Lincoln’s face suddenly falls into a mosaic of ruts as he takes the paper Seward hands him, reads. Then, staring at the ceiling as if begging for some god to descend, he motions for Seward to sit.

  Welles feels something pound in his chest. Good Lord, the man doesn’t remember his own orders.

  A smug, thin-lipped smile begins to spread over Seward’s lips again.

  “Lieutenant Porter and I were here with you not more than a week ago. We planned how Porter would take the Powhatan to Pensacola to reinforce Fort Pickens and give us a long-term strategic base on the Gulf Coast. You must remember.”

  Lincoln’s mouth moves, but no words come out for several seconds. “I thought … I thought it was another ship that young man was taking. Surely not the Powhatan. You handed me the order, Bill, and … and I just signed off on it. I didn’t note the name of the ship and …”

  Now the president pulls at his ears unconsciously, then hands the secret order to Welles.

  “My god, Gideon. Can you forgive me? It seems I have given away your battle ship. Didn’t you say she’s still waiting in Brooklyn to resolve the confusion in her orders? We can send another order, send her as you planned with Mercer to Fort Sumter.”

  “Don’t do it!” Seward’s on his feet, pointing his finger at Lincoln. “You’ll destroy the secret mission. We’ve got troops already committed. You’ll lose those men and the Gulf Coast for a stupid little fort in Charleston.”

  Suddenly a massive tick begins to shudder above the president’s right cheek. His lip curls.

  “Sit down, Mr. Seward. Sit down right now. If you ever point a finger at me again, I’ll break it off. Do you understand me, sir? We are not talking about some stupid little fort in South Carolina. We are talking about a symbol. And you know it. We give up Sumter, we are showing the nation’s weakness. We are as good as giving the Rebels an invitation to war. Do you want that, Mr. Seward? Do you want Virginia and Maryland to go over to the secesh states? Do you want secesh militia shooting it out with us here on Pennsylvania Avenue? You tricked me, Mr. Seward, into something for your own mercurial purposes. I’ve been a fool. But once burned, twice shy, sir. Never again, Mr. Secretary! Perhaps it’s still not too late to send Gideon’s ship to Sumter.”