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another Irish brigade. Right now Stanton will not hear of it.”
    Stanton was trying to make sure Lincoln heard no more of it either, but later the President brought the subject up again and asked how Meagher was doing. Stanton huffed that the Irishman had lost interest. Lincoln was surprised and replied, “Did you ever know an Irishman who would decline an office, or refuse a pair of epaulets, or do anything but fight gallantly after them?” 9
USS
NANSEMOND
AT SEA OFF WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA, 10:15 AM , AUGUST 1, 1863
    The lookout in the crow’s nest shouted out, “Ahoy! Black smoke to the southwest!” Battle stations sounded, scattering men to their posts. The engines pulsed with heaps of coal-fired energy as the
Nansemond
turned after its prey.
    She had been built just the year before as a side-wheel steamer of four hundred tons and named the
James Freeborn
and taken into service as a blockade ship. Her speed of almost fifteen knots was enormous but necessary if the Navy was to intercept the even fleeter blockade-runners being built in Britain. She had taken the name of
Nansemond
, the James River tributary of that name, to honor the intrepid successes her newcommander had won on that river. This twenty-five-year-old naval prodigy, Lt. Roswell Hawks Lamson, had been second in the Annapolis class of 1862. Under his hands, she raced through the waves.
    It was a rare navy that would allow one so young to trod his own quarterdeck as captain, but national crisis brought out talent, and Lamson’s hard fighting on the Virginia rivers had delighted the old admirals. They could not reward him fast enough for the qualities that were a premium in this grinding war against a resourceful and valiant foe. They called his skill “Lamson’s Luck,” though “luck” was not the half of it.
    He was commanding a gunboat squadron on the Nansemond River in late April during the Suffolk campaign. Lt. Gen. James Longstreet and his 1st Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia had been sent there to counter an expected Union offensive fueled by reinforcements. When the reinforcements were sent elsewhere, he converted his defensive mission to an offensive one to cut the communications of the twenty thousand Union troops in the Suffolk area. He had to cross the Nansemond to do it. On the morning of April 14, Lamson was taking the USS
Mount Washington
down the river to Suffolk when he was engaged by a Confederate battery at Norleet’s Point. The first enemy salvo blew up his boilers, and the ship began to drift ashore under heavy fire. Another of his vessels pulled him off the shore, only to ground the
Mount Washington
in crossing the bar. Another ten pieces of enemy artillery and hundreds of riflemen opened up at 11:00 AM . He fought them from his stationary position on the bar until 6:00 PM . He reported later that
her boilers, cylinders, and steel drums pierced and ten shells went through the smoke pipe, and the rest of the machinery much damaged. Her pilot house riddled, wheelropes shot away, and her decks and bulwarks completely splintered, everyone who has seen her says there has not been another vessel so shot to pieces during the war. The flag-staff was shot away, and when the flag fell into the water, the rebs cheered exultingly; but they did not enjoy it for long before we had the dear old stars and stripes waving over us again, with everyone more determined than ever to fight them to the last timber of the vessel. 10
     
    Followed by a master’s mate and seaman, Lamson climbed through the wreckage to the upper deck. They hauled up the flagstaff by theensign halyards, raised and lashed it to the stump. He considered it a miracle that they all survived unscathed, only one of many miracles that seemed to fall on that ship amid the rebel shot and shell. “After the action was over, the sailors gathered around me on the deck, took hold of my hands and arms, threw their arms around me, and I saw tears starting from eyes that had