Read Online Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History by Peter G. Tsouras - Free Book Online

Sharpe. Colonel, this is Gus Fox whom I’m sure you’ve heard of.”
    Fox sized up Sharpe and was not impressed as they shook hands. “Dana here speaks highly of you, Colonel, don’t you, Charlie?” Sharpe’s handshake was firm, not what Fox expected from such a nondescript-looking man. Then Fox was as taken aback as the lieutenant at the railroad station had been by the transformation of Sharpe’s face. There was power there. He remembered to introduce Lamson, who found some comfort in the presence of another officer in this otherwise intimidating setting of the Executive Mansion, even if it was an Army officer three grades his senior. Fox and Dana drifted off to a corner to talk, leaving the colonel and the lieutenant to their thoughts.
    Upstairs the cabinet was meeting with the President. The room in which they regularly met was austere, the only decorations being a large series of maps on one wall and on the other an old engraving of Andrew Jackson and a small framed photographic portrait of John Bright, a man Lincoln admired immensely. Bright was a member of the British Parliament whose impassioned support of the United States in its struggle had earned him the derisive title of “Member from the United States.” At times he seemed to be the only member of the British establishment who took up the cause of the Union. His powerful antislavery message resonated more with working- and middle-class Britons than with the ruling and business classes whose palpable disdain for the Union was returnedwith a bitter resentment by the Americans. Establishment Britain anticipated a Southern victory with undisguised glee. That was not lost on the men sitting at the table. A recent centerpiece for the table, a jagged piece of shell, had been presented by Meade after Gettysburg. It had been fired by a Whitworth breech-loading rifled cannon presented as a gift to the Confederacy by the London Chamber of Commerce. 1
    Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward, held the floor. He was the man who informed opinion acknowledged should have been president and was probably the most distinguished man in the country before the war. He had been governor of New York and a senator thereafter. The 1860 nomination of the new Republican Party seemed his for the taking, until the Log Splitter from Illinois carried off the prize from under Seward’s enormous Roman nose. That was not the first time he had underestimated Lincoln. When the new president sought the best men for his cabinet, he turned to Seward to be his senior cabinet officer. Seward thought at first that that position gave him license to determine policy for the unsophisticated lawyer from the West. When he got over his shock that Lincoln would be his own man and was quite capable of it, their relationship settled into one of mutual respect and even friendship. Seward was a man without political rancor and served to the best of his considerable ability. For that reason, he did not object when Lincoln made Thomas Haines Dudley the U.S. consul in Liverpool. Dudley was the Connecticut politician whose support had swung the Republican nomination away from Seward to Lincoln. The appointment was more than a political reward; Lincoln had placed an able man in a sensitive post, which Seward did not fail to recognize. 2
    Still, Seward was an enormous presence in any room. A slight man, thin-faced with a mop of tousled hair that no comb dared approach, he was the master of his own domain of foreign policy, subject only to Lincoln’s broad policy guidance. William Russell, the famous British journalist, described him in 1861 as “a subtle, quick man, rejoicing in power, given to perorate and to oracular utterances, fond of badinage, bursting with the importance of state mysteries, and with the dignity of directing foreign policy of the greatest country—as all Americans think—in the world.” 3 He had not hesitated to use that power in the dangerous first months of Lincoln’s