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Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.
I think this one might need a trigger warning.
Having been stalemated at Falmouth and again in Florida, General Cole was of a mind to do something daring. In the height of summer, when the Trafalgar hangings were done and fighting along the Suwanee had mostly died down and could be left to Morrison and FitzGerald, he began embarking on “The Great Raid,” a project he’d been planning since spring. For this mission, Cole took Muscogee scouts, Hidden Trail guides, a thousand Haitian mercenaries, and what he hoped would be enough food to sustain several hundred refugees on the trail.
By now, Dade’s army in Apalachicola consisted of garrisons at Tohopeka, Tallahassee, and the border forts (Uwaholatte[1] and Fort Finisterre remained unconquered) and a few patrols that were large enough to defend themselves against attack, but at the expense of being too widely spaced to effectively patrol the province. The scouts and guides led him out of the way of these patrols and across the border. On the night of July 15, they struck the town of Attapulgus, Georgia.
Fully half the Georgia militia guarding the town had been reassigned to join Dade’s invasion force. The rest had, at this point, gotten used to the idea that the fighting had moved south. They were not prepared for an attack out of nowhere in the middle of the night, particularly by soldiers who had spent years learning how to move silently through forests and planted areas and slit the throats of sentries in the dark—and who outnumbered them two to one. Of the 528 militiamen stationed there that night, fully half were killed, many of them as they were scrambling out of bed and reaching for weapons. The rest fled to Bainbridge, a few stopping in Attapulgus to sound the alarm, pull wives and children out of bed and put them on the backs of horses.
The village of Attapulgus itself was a target of opportunity, and unlike the true Hessians, the “Black Hessians” did not have a centuries-old tradition of military discipline. Cole was helpless to stop them from plundering. But Attapulgus had been reduced to the status of a company town, and like mining communities throughout the world, it suffered from small-scale maldition[2]. Instead of planters’ townhouses full of treasure, the raiders found only a handful of modest homes belonging to small farmers, overseers for the Georgia Mining Company, a farrier, and a company store with a bare handful of overpriced items…
“He was standing in the doorway. With the light behind him and a nightcap on his head, I couldn’t even see if he was white or black. He was certainly raising a gun, though, so I used mine first. That was the only time in my life I ever killed a man who wasn’t a soldier.
“When I stepped over him—and I was glad he turned out to be white, it would’ve been a damned shame to kill one of the people they said we were here to save—the inside of the house… well, it was better than the home I grew up in, but I’d already seen the fine homes of Pétion-Ville[3] and the Back Circle[4]—the outside of ’em, anyway. So I knew it was just a little two-room shack.
“I looked at the desk, and there were banknotes just lying there—maybe a dozen. I grabbed ‘em and stuck ‘em in my pockets, and then behind me Sergeant Claude just laughed. He said, ‘What are you going to do with that shit[5], fool? Go up to Charleston and buy yourself a hat?’ He went for the kitchen and grabbed the skillet and the knife.
“And just as he was putting them in his pack, the lieutenant came. I’ve never heard a man curse that long. He made us hand it all over—made me turn out my pockets. He said what was stolen had to be shared by all alike. He told us how when he fought the Spaniards, they found a baggage train and started to loot it, but nobody wanted to be the one standing guard while his friends stuffed their packs. So they didn’t have any warning when a bunch of Filipinos came along by surprise and killed almost everybody.
“For punishment, we got to go back to the quarry and look for stragglers, hurry ‘em along so we could all be gone before morning. Which meant we weren’t there when they dragged out the women—maybe nine or ten that didn’t get away. Lieutenant thought he was punishing us, making sure we didn’t get a turn. But I heard those screams and… you know they say a boy as young as I was only got one thing on his mind? It ain’t true. I heard those screams and I got down in the clay and threw up. Wasn’t nothing in my stomach, but I threw up anyway.
“And afterwards, we found out the money was all mining company scrip. Couldn’t even have bought a hat with it.”
By all accounts, the majority of the quarry slaves were eager to leave—the GMC had made not the slightest effort to maintain connections between them and their families, or indeed to offer hope of ever seeing those families again. For those that were uneasy about disappearing into a strange land in the dead of night surrounded by violent strangers, the corpses of white militiamen strewn about, the burning of Attapulgus and the screams of white women were incentive enough. They knew the Georgia militia would return in force with the Army at its back and wreak the bloodiest retribution it was within their power to inflict, and would be even less likely to spare innocents than the mercenaries themselves had been. They fled, stopping only to take the mining camp’s supply of cornmeal and sowbelly and raid a few chicken coops for extra protein.
The Tallahassee garrison was under the command of Colonel Alexander Baron Brailsford, a descendant of William Moultrie. According to his own correspondence, Colonel Brailsford had no idea precisely what had happened at Attapulgus, and, assuming that the army of “Black Hessians” coming from the north was attempting to retake the town by attacking from an unexpected direction, readied to meet them. When his scouts reported that this army was accompanied by some 500 unarmed black males, he realized that they could only have come from one place. He mobilized the garrison to intercept them.
He did not realize that Cole had anticipated this move, and had made plans to intercept him in turn. A force of waterdragoons under the command of John Horse canoed up the Ochlockonee and hit his army in the left flank while he was deploying to cross, some five kilometers west of Tallahassee.
The result was the bloody but indecisive Battle of the Ochlockonee. Horse forced the Americans onto the defensive, but could not defeat them. Brailsford tried to deploy the right wing of his army across the creek, but there it collided with the Haitians and was again forced to hold its ground. Mistaking a Haitian feint for an attempt to retake Tallahasse behind his back, Brailsford retreated to the town.
The battle had done its job. Within a few days, the escapees were safe inside what had become the fortress of Uwaholatte…
Sunday evening. August 5, 1838. The sun had just set, and the full moon was rising over the Atlantic. By its light, the Royal Navy was preparing to attack Charleston, the beating heart of the American South.
The first stage of the attack was carried out by stealth. The experimental screw-frigate HMS Telchine steamed into the harbor between Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, sails furled to make her less conspicuous, towing a train of three smaller vessels behind her. Once they were in the harbor, Farquhar ordered the smaller ships’ sails unfurled and their bows pointed north, lit the fuses, and turned them loose one by one. These were the same sort of fireships that Lord Byron had used to such effect against the Ottoman fleet sixteen years earlier, and the winds out of the south blew them directly into the mass of shipping huddled against the east side of the harbor.
Just before the fireships went off, the second stage of the attack began. This was an all-out bomb-ship and rocket-ship assault on Fort Sumter. The harbor forts had no columbiads, and the attempt to provide them with Stabler’s No. 23 bombheads had ended in the Belfield disaster. Nonetheless, they were well equipped with rockets and heavy guns.[6] In addition to their launching-chambers, each of the rocket-ships was equipped with eight of Brunel’s rifled cannon, which, though they took ten minutes to load, could strike the fortress walls from a distance at which the Americans could make no response. It was with these that they began to engage the forts, seeking to damage enough guns to create a blind spot within which the rest of the fleet could safely approach—on the southwest side, where Fort Sumter itself would shield them from Fort Moultrie.
This was only partly successful. At least one of the fort’s guns was still operational, and in any case since rocket tripods were easy to lift and move, no blind spot could remain blind for long. And as Fort Sumter was barely half a kilometer from the southern shore, the garrison had tripods already set up there by the time the fleet was in position.
The immediate consequences of the battle were less than might be expected. The fort was damaged, but survived—the only casaulties were from bombs that fell in the open areas. Of the whole British fleet, only HMS Typhon was lost to fire from Fort Sumter—the Erebus[7] was destroyed by an explosion among its own shells, and the rocket-ship Hailfire had to be abandoned when the launching-chamber failed and backblast from her own rockets, as well as rockets from the shore, burned away most of the rigging. Captain Louis D’Orleans of HMS Wellesley was able to rescue the crew of the Hailfire and many of the Typhon’s crew—who had, not long ago, been his own shipmates aboard the Howe. Captain Farquhar was wounded while trying to take advantage of the distraction to pilot his ship past the fort, but Lt. Douglas was able to give the report: “We lost our foremast and mizzenmast, and enough 68-pound cannonballs went through our amidships to smash any paddle-wheel ever built. But they couldn’t hit us low enough to hurt the screws or the engine. We made it home. Tell the Navy this machine works.”
[1] OTL Carabelle, Fla.
[2] At some point in the early 20th century ITTL, someone much better at economics than linguistics is going to translate the Colombian phrase maldición negra as “black maldition,” thereby inserting this word into the English language. It means “resource curse,” and is generally used whenever a place is a source of wealth, but is none too wealthy itself.
[3] The wealthiest neighborhood of Port-au-Prince.
[4] The wealthiest neighborhood of Trafalgar.
[5] The journalist who first collected this interview did some heavy expurgation before printing it. The anthologists who compiled To Kill and Die for Pay got hold of the original notes.
[6] Contrast this with OTL, where the Navy began building Fort Sumter in 1829 and was still at it in 1861.
[7] In the interest of clarity, this isn’t the Erebus that served in the Battle of Baltimore in 1814, but a different ship.
I think this one might need a trigger warning.
Having been stalemated at Falmouth and again in Florida, General Cole was of a mind to do something daring. In the height of summer, when the Trafalgar hangings were done and fighting along the Suwanee had mostly died down and could be left to Morrison and FitzGerald, he began embarking on “The Great Raid,” a project he’d been planning since spring. For this mission, Cole took Muscogee scouts, Hidden Trail guides, a thousand Haitian mercenaries, and what he hoped would be enough food to sustain several hundred refugees on the trail.
By now, Dade’s army in Apalachicola consisted of garrisons at Tohopeka, Tallahassee, and the border forts (Uwaholatte[1] and Fort Finisterre remained unconquered) and a few patrols that were large enough to defend themselves against attack, but at the expense of being too widely spaced to effectively patrol the province. The scouts and guides led him out of the way of these patrols and across the border. On the night of July 15, they struck the town of Attapulgus, Georgia.
Fully half the Georgia militia guarding the town had been reassigned to join Dade’s invasion force. The rest had, at this point, gotten used to the idea that the fighting had moved south. They were not prepared for an attack out of nowhere in the middle of the night, particularly by soldiers who had spent years learning how to move silently through forests and planted areas and slit the throats of sentries in the dark—and who outnumbered them two to one. Of the 528 militiamen stationed there that night, fully half were killed, many of them as they were scrambling out of bed and reaching for weapons. The rest fled to Bainbridge, a few stopping in Attapulgus to sound the alarm, pull wives and children out of bed and put them on the backs of horses.
The village of Attapulgus itself was a target of opportunity, and unlike the true Hessians, the “Black Hessians” did not have a centuries-old tradition of military discipline. Cole was helpless to stop them from plundering. But Attapulgus had been reduced to the status of a company town, and like mining communities throughout the world, it suffered from small-scale maldition[2]. Instead of planters’ townhouses full of treasure, the raiders found only a handful of modest homes belonging to small farmers, overseers for the Georgia Mining Company, a farrier, and a company store with a bare handful of overpriced items…
David Harvey Copp, Campaigns of the War of 1837
“He was standing in the doorway. With the light behind him and a nightcap on his head, I couldn’t even see if he was white or black. He was certainly raising a gun, though, so I used mine first. That was the only time in my life I ever killed a man who wasn’t a soldier.
“When I stepped over him—and I was glad he turned out to be white, it would’ve been a damned shame to kill one of the people they said we were here to save—the inside of the house… well, it was better than the home I grew up in, but I’d already seen the fine homes of Pétion-Ville[3] and the Back Circle[4]—the outside of ’em, anyway. So I knew it was just a little two-room shack.
“I looked at the desk, and there were banknotes just lying there—maybe a dozen. I grabbed ‘em and stuck ‘em in my pockets, and then behind me Sergeant Claude just laughed. He said, ‘What are you going to do with that shit[5], fool? Go up to Charleston and buy yourself a hat?’ He went for the kitchen and grabbed the skillet and the knife.
“And just as he was putting them in his pack, the lieutenant came. I’ve never heard a man curse that long. He made us hand it all over—made me turn out my pockets. He said what was stolen had to be shared by all alike. He told us how when he fought the Spaniards, they found a baggage train and started to loot it, but nobody wanted to be the one standing guard while his friends stuffed their packs. So they didn’t have any warning when a bunch of Filipinos came along by surprise and killed almost everybody.
“For punishment, we got to go back to the quarry and look for stragglers, hurry ‘em along so we could all be gone before morning. Which meant we weren’t there when they dragged out the women—maybe nine or ten that didn’t get away. Lieutenant thought he was punishing us, making sure we didn’t get a turn. But I heard those screams and… you know they say a boy as young as I was only got one thing on his mind? It ain’t true. I heard those screams and I got down in the clay and threw up. Wasn’t nothing in my stomach, but I threw up anyway.
“And afterwards, we found out the money was all mining company scrip. Couldn’t even have bought a hat with it.”
Lucien Pelletreau, as quoted in To Kill and Die for Pay; Voices and Stories of Mercenaries
By all accounts, the majority of the quarry slaves were eager to leave—the GMC had made not the slightest effort to maintain connections between them and their families, or indeed to offer hope of ever seeing those families again. For those that were uneasy about disappearing into a strange land in the dead of night surrounded by violent strangers, the corpses of white militiamen strewn about, the burning of Attapulgus and the screams of white women were incentive enough. They knew the Georgia militia would return in force with the Army at its back and wreak the bloodiest retribution it was within their power to inflict, and would be even less likely to spare innocents than the mercenaries themselves had been. They fled, stopping only to take the mining camp’s supply of cornmeal and sowbelly and raid a few chicken coops for extra protein.
The Tallahassee garrison was under the command of Colonel Alexander Baron Brailsford, a descendant of William Moultrie. According to his own correspondence, Colonel Brailsford had no idea precisely what had happened at Attapulgus, and, assuming that the army of “Black Hessians” coming from the north was attempting to retake the town by attacking from an unexpected direction, readied to meet them. When his scouts reported that this army was accompanied by some 500 unarmed black males, he realized that they could only have come from one place. He mobilized the garrison to intercept them.
He did not realize that Cole had anticipated this move, and had made plans to intercept him in turn. A force of waterdragoons under the command of John Horse canoed up the Ochlockonee and hit his army in the left flank while he was deploying to cross, some five kilometers west of Tallahassee.
The result was the bloody but indecisive Battle of the Ochlockonee. Horse forced the Americans onto the defensive, but could not defeat them. Brailsford tried to deploy the right wing of his army across the creek, but there it collided with the Haitians and was again forced to hold its ground. Mistaking a Haitian feint for an attempt to retake Tallahasse behind his back, Brailsford retreated to the town.
The battle had done its job. Within a few days, the escapees were safe inside what had become the fortress of Uwaholatte…
David Harvey Copp, Campaigns of the War of 1837
Sunday evening. August 5, 1838. The sun had just set, and the full moon was rising over the Atlantic. By its light, the Royal Navy was preparing to attack Charleston, the beating heart of the American South.
The first stage of the attack was carried out by stealth. The experimental screw-frigate HMS Telchine steamed into the harbor between Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, sails furled to make her less conspicuous, towing a train of three smaller vessels behind her. Once they were in the harbor, Farquhar ordered the smaller ships’ sails unfurled and their bows pointed north, lit the fuses, and turned them loose one by one. These were the same sort of fireships that Lord Byron had used to such effect against the Ottoman fleet sixteen years earlier, and the winds out of the south blew them directly into the mass of shipping huddled against the east side of the harbor.
Just before the fireships went off, the second stage of the attack began. This was an all-out bomb-ship and rocket-ship assault on Fort Sumter. The harbor forts had no columbiads, and the attempt to provide them with Stabler’s No. 23 bombheads had ended in the Belfield disaster. Nonetheless, they were well equipped with rockets and heavy guns.[6] In addition to their launching-chambers, each of the rocket-ships was equipped with eight of Brunel’s rifled cannon, which, though they took ten minutes to load, could strike the fortress walls from a distance at which the Americans could make no response. It was with these that they began to engage the forts, seeking to damage enough guns to create a blind spot within which the rest of the fleet could safely approach—on the southwest side, where Fort Sumter itself would shield them from Fort Moultrie.
This was only partly successful. At least one of the fort’s guns was still operational, and in any case since rocket tripods were easy to lift and move, no blind spot could remain blind for long. And as Fort Sumter was barely half a kilometer from the southern shore, the garrison had tripods already set up there by the time the fleet was in position.
The immediate consequences of the battle were less than might be expected. The fort was damaged, but survived—the only casaulties were from bombs that fell in the open areas. Of the whole British fleet, only HMS Typhon was lost to fire from Fort Sumter—the Erebus[7] was destroyed by an explosion among its own shells, and the rocket-ship Hailfire had to be abandoned when the launching-chamber failed and backblast from her own rockets, as well as rockets from the shore, burned away most of the rigging. Captain Louis D’Orleans of HMS Wellesley was able to rescue the crew of the Hailfire and many of the Typhon’s crew—who had, not long ago, been his own shipmates aboard the Howe. Captain Farquhar was wounded while trying to take advantage of the distraction to pilot his ship past the fort, but Lt. Douglas was able to give the report: “We lost our foremast and mizzenmast, and enough 68-pound cannonballs went through our amidships to smash any paddle-wheel ever built. But they couldn’t hit us low enough to hurt the screws or the engine. We made it home. Tell the Navy this machine works.”
Eric Wayne Ellison, Anglo-American Wars of the 19th Century
[1] OTL Carabelle, Fla.
[2] At some point in the early 20th century ITTL, someone much better at economics than linguistics is going to translate the Colombian phrase maldición negra as “black maldition,” thereby inserting this word into the English language. It means “resource curse,” and is generally used whenever a place is a source of wealth, but is none too wealthy itself.
[3] The wealthiest neighborhood of Port-au-Prince.
[4] The wealthiest neighborhood of Trafalgar.
[5] The journalist who first collected this interview did some heavy expurgation before printing it. The anthologists who compiled To Kill and Die for Pay got hold of the original notes.
[6] Contrast this with OTL, where the Navy began building Fort Sumter in 1829 and was still at it in 1861.
[7] In the interest of clarity, this isn’t the Erebus that served in the Battle of Baltimore in 1814, but a different ship.
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