“Good lord,” said Grant as they closed the door behind them. “I thought they were going to rip my uniform off.” “You're popular, General. People are beginning to think you're going to be the Union's savior.”
Grant sat in a chair and smiled wanly. “First of all, I am nobody's savior. Second, in private circumstances like this, I would appreciate it if you indeed would please call me Sam. I think I need friends more than I need rank and its privileges. Just think, Nathan, I was actually going to bring my son Fred with me. The boy would have been overwhelmed.”
Young Fred Grant was about twelve and, in Nathan's opinion, would have enjoyed the whole thing. However, Julia and the rest of the Grant family had not made the trip. If appropriate, they would follow later. The only real issue was just what Grant's future command would be. Lincoln had not told Scott, and rumors were rampant. The most common had Grant taking command of the Army of the Potomac, as that command had been fragmented for several months with Halleck as titular head and Meade commanding the large garrison in Washington.
Grant walked to a window and looked down on the throngs gathered below on Pennsylvania Avenue. Someone spotted him and the cheering began anew. It didn't end until Nathan went to the window and announced that, while General Grant didn't make speeches, he was happy and pleased at the reception.
“Y'know,” said Grant as he settled into a large chair. “Once upon a time, something like this would have caused me to take drink. Not now, though. This time,” he grinned, “I'll settle for a cigar. After all, nobody's ever died from smoking.”
The pain was too much for a man to endure, but what choice had he? Hannibal Watson lay shackled to the wall in the filthy straw of the cell and wondered if the fact that he was still alive was good or bad.
He groaned. His face throbbed and pulsated where his left eye had been. Now it was a mass of putrefying flesh that would likely kill him if the Confederates didn't hang him first. Most of the other wounds on his body had begun to heal, but not his eye and not those to his soul.
They had sent dogs into the cave. While these ripped at him, tearing at him and destroying his eye, men had followed and trussed him like a hog. They had called off the animals, brought him out into the sunlight, and displayed him like a trophy. There had been whooping and shooting into the air. They had acted like he was someone truly important: which had puzzled him.
Then they'd put him in a cage and put the cage on a wagon. As the centerpiece of a small parade, he'd been taken to the railroad and shipped to Richmond. There, he overheard guards talking about his slave rebellion and his slave army. What the hell? Hannibal thought. What slave army? At most he'd had a hundred people and 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 the Warrior, the largest and most powerful warship in the world. While the Warrior was the only iron-hulled ship in his fleet, he could counter with not only her but with other massive ships of the line, including the Agamemnon, Vulture, Eurylaus, Dragon. and Powerful, which steamed in column behind the Warrior. 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 the Warrior. Or like the Monitor, he thought with a shudder. What an ugly beast.